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Revolution and domesticity in Egyptian women's political texts
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Revolution and domesticity in Egyptian women's political texts
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Content
REVOLUTION AND DOMESTICITY IN EGYPTIAN WOMEN’S POLITICAL TEXTS
by
Nada Ayad
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALFORNIA
In partial fulfillment of the
Requirements of the Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
(Comparative Literature)
August 2016
2
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract 3
Acknowledgments 4
Introduction: “Even the Women Came Out of their Houses: Revolution and 6
Domesticity in Egyptian Women’s Political Texts
Chapter One: Domesticating the Revolutionary: between Mudhakkirat Huda 36
Sha’rawi and Harem Years
Chapter Two: Home as Metaphor for the Nation-State in Latifa al-Zayyat’s 82
The Open Door and The Owner of the House
Chapter Three: Resistance in Ahdaf Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun: Laughter, 121
Kinship, and Untranslatability
Chapter Four: An Exclusive Revolution: Domesticity and Class in 151
the Texts of the 2011 Tahrir Revolution
Conclusion: Looking Forward 187
Bibliography 193
3
ABSTRACT
Many of the issues raised in scholarship on women of the Arab world are represented in literary
texts that have provided some of the most eloquent and perceptive readings of women’s
subjectivity and the region’s transformation in a form, language, metaphor and idiom that are
part and parcel of such transformations. This project uses the historical events of Egypt’s three
revolutions – 1919, 1952, 2011 – as the structural framework to investigate the interlacing of the
tropes of revolution and domesticity in Egyptian women’s political novels, memoirs, and video
blogs. Examining Huda Sha’rawi, Latifa al-Zayyat, Ahdaf Soueif, Mona Prince and Asmaa
Mahfouz’s texts, I contend that these writers and political activists engage with issues of
domesticity not only to incite, participate in, and critique their respective revolutionary moments,
but also as a means of imagining a post-revolutionary nation. In each text, the image of the new
nation is inscribed as central to the happenings of the home; that is, intimate details of the
ordinary, courtship rituals, mothering, practices of consumption, everyday cleaning, and care-
taking constitute a revolutionary praxis. Furthermore, I extend the trope of domesticity to
investigate the movement of the texts from their national Arabic readership to a transnational
English readership. Often, domesticating the texts into the English language calls for eclipsing
the differences between Modern Standard Arabic and Egyptian dialect, as well as omissions and
additions that are at times incongruent with the motivations of the original pieces. Underwriting
these strategies is an Orientalist analytical framework that creates and magnifies differences
between the so-called East and West.
4
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This dissertation studies belonging in language and in space, and I have many people to thank for
making me feel like I belong -- both intellectually and emotionally in communities across the
world. Just as this work transformed me, they have formed me. My words will prove to be
inadequate in expressing the enormity of my gratitude.
First, thanks go to my mother, Azza Ayad, who has shown sacrifice beyond measure. Her
humanity graces many lives and I am grateful that she gave me mine. For this and for her many
other selfless gifts I will remain always in awe and in her debt. Thanks to my father, Yehia Ayad,
who was the first feminist I knew, whose commitment to education and his vision of a better life
for his children has partially made mine what it is today. To my brother, Nader Ayad, a kinder
soul and sister-supporter this world has not seen. And to the rest of my family, Laura, and my
niece Layla – whose mere presence always put a smile and illuminated perspectives I was
unaware of. My cousins, aunts and uncles, who, through texts and emails, phone calls and visits,
from New York and Egypt and many places in-between make me always felt like I belonged.
The trajectory of my life has allowed me to cross paths and collect generous souls who now
make up my collective family. Enormous thanks go to Candice, Karen, Megan, Priscilla, Ray,
and Sherry. They have held me, held on and held me up – as well as fed, listened and talked to
me. I am happy that this scholarship has allowed me to further expand this collective family. At
USC, I was able to collect more family of invigorating spirit. Sandy, my soul sister in more ways
than one, a shining light in my life; Ricardo, whose dedication to and encouragement of this
project in its nascent forms breathed life into it, and who believed in me when I often didn’t
believe in myself; Gino, Sam and Shao, such inspiring, humble and humbling examples, so
supportive and generous with their time, advice. Vanessa Raabe has read and reread sections of
this work. Her editing, comments, and encouragement were fuel for me.
Enormous gratitude goes to my advisor, Antonia Szarabi, whose Zen advice I could always count
on, and who pushed me to sharpen my mind, and to be much better than I am. She has taught me
scholarship, intellectual generosity, humanity, patience and grace. Who I am today as a scholar is
indebted to her. She is a model I hope to emulate in more ways than one. Big thanks go to the
other members of my committee, Olivia Harrison, and Sarah Gualitieri. Their understanding,
compassion, feedback and comments in times when I knew they were very busy were a pulse
that propelled me. I hope to be as thoughtful and generous a mentor as they were. Neetu Khanna
and Natania Meeker showed up in the most unexpected of times. Seeing them was always
serendipitous and their encouragements and suggestions were invaluable. Their exacting
comments were always poignant and set to work a variety of questions that led my project to be
better than it was. Their generosity of spirit and time are qualities that I will take with me, and
will hope, and fail, to emulate. The space of the postcolonial reading group, created by Neetu
Khannah, nurtured me and helped shape my thinking. Thanks also to Jack Halberstam, Edwin
Hill, Julian Daniel Gutierrez-Albilla. To the department of Comparative Literature at University
of Southern California, for their enduring support, and for nurturing my growth over the years.
At l’institut du monde arab, Hafid Aitkiki, Arabic teacher and friend, made my time in Paris that
much more worthwhile and valuable.
5
Perhaps most importantly, this dissertation is dedicated to the innumerable lives accounted and
unaccounted, for who fought and continue to fight for justice, dignity, voice, hope and equality.
To them, I owe the biggest debt.
.
6
INTRODUCTION:
“EVEN THE WOMEN CAME OUT OF THEIR HOUSES”: REVOLUTION AND
DOMESTICITY IN EGYPTIAN WOMEN’ S POLITICAL TEXTS
“The realities of power and authority – as well as the resistances offered by men, women, and
social movements to institutions, authorities and orthodoxies –are the realities that make texts
possible, that deliver them to their readers, that solicit the attention of critics.”
-- Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983)
“I wrote, too, about the sweet-potato carts and the pumpkin seeds with their white salt-
coats and the cotton-candy man on Mohamed Mahmoud Street, his stick of fairy-pink
floss strapped to his back and waving madly amidst the fighting.”
-- Wiam El-Tamami, “A wish not to betray” (2015)
The 2011 events of the so-called Arab Spring caught the much of the world by surprise. It
frustrated the prevailing image of the “Arab world” as a place of fundamentalists and extremists.
However, the view of women as agent-less victims persisted. This is made evident in an article
published in February of 2011 by the on-line magazine Qantara, whose motto it is to foster
“dialogue with the Islamic world.” In the article, the tenacity of the image of the Arab world as
languishing behind Europe is only rivaled by the persistent use of “Arab women’s” position in
society as a barometer of progress or regression. The author’s shock by women’s involvement in
the revolution
1
is brought to light in her observation that “[w] hat did come as a surprise… was
the very visible commitment and efficiency with which the large number of women involved set
about organizing the uprising … it demonstrated a willingness and determination to get out on
the streets and physically go from door to door drumming up support.”
2
The author reads “Arab
1
I use the word revolution to describe the ongoing process of transformation in Egypt since 2011 because it is the
most apt translation of the word thawra, which is used by Egyptians and most people in the Middle East to describe
recent events.
2
These and other reductive explanations of all revolutions in the Middle East are well documented in Govand
Khaled Azeez’s article “The Thingified Subject’s Resistance in the Middle East,” Middle East Critique 24(2): 111—
35. He links these explanations to broader strategies historically used to undermine uprisings in the region and
explain them away as “mere attempted failures at capitalist modernity and nationalism by a few hopeful
Westernized or Western-supported Orientals importing foreign philosophies, ideals and concepts” (120-1). In the
specific case of the 2011 Egyptian revolution and the so-called “Arab Spring”, Azeez points out, “political
7
women’s” presence in the streets of their respective country as not only an anomaly but also as
an indicator of an up-to-now unavailable agency: “This new self-confidence of young Arab
women is an indication of the kind of profound social changes that are taking place in the MENA
countries…. Even if the Arab world is still trailing behind the rest of the world….”
3
The
assumption that the recent events of the revolution spurred women of the region to consciousness
betrays the monolithic, ahistorical, inert image used to describe “Arab women.” The fact that it is
worthy to note how “striking [it was] to see how unselfconscious and respectful the men and
women of the revolution were to one another” speaks to the persistent assumption of victimhood
and misogyny that “Arab women” endure. In addition, the emphasis on women’s physical
presence in the streets reveals their association with a domestic space that is assumed to be
oppressive, and apolitical-- an association informed by Orientalist frames of analysis that ossify
“Arab women” in their perceived victim status. Furthermore, the emphasis on newness betrays
an amnesia regarding a rich and varied history of “Arab women’s” political activism and
participation while recycling tried rhetoric which rests on a set of binaries – east/west,
public/private, political/domestic, visible/invisible.
Women from the Middle East and North Africa have been and continue to be interpreted
and analyzed through Orientalist frameworks. This has reduced the terms of analysis to a list of
perceived grievances suffered: veiling, polygamy, clitoridectomy, virginity, forced marriages,
frequent births, repudiation, and crimes of "honor." Because of continued reliance on such
paradigms, the Arab world maintains its status as “Other.” For example, the translated English
memoirs of the Egyptian Huda Sha’rawi -- the famed political activist of the 1919 Revolution
commentators attributed the revolutions to ‘social media’ and the ‘shy American intellectual Gene Sharp’ or the
‘Obama factor’, ‘Google Earth’, ‘Israel’s democracy’ or even the know-how of a Serbian organization’” (129).
3
Emphasis added.
8
against English Occupation – relies on the veil as a sartorial extension of the harem, and as a
confirmation of women’s denial of access to public space. However, as I elaborate on in chapter
one, the Arabic version of the memoirs uncovers Sha’rawi’s deployment of domesticity for
nationalist motivations, and that processes of translation – interlinguistically, as well as
intralinguistically – render the Arabic text’s relationship with its English translation more
ambivalent.
Middle Eastern studies scholars of recent decades have thoughtfully interrogated these
assumptions. Lila Abu- Lughod, Amal Amireh, for example have critiqued the Orientalist
frameworks that serve mainly to ossify “Arab women” in time as agentless victims.
4
They argue
that an overemphasis on the confining elements of harem life, on the relentless injustices of
marriage, and the ruthless violence of the patriarchy that is backed by a neo-colonial order, as
well as blindness to what class privilege affords, recycles and reinforces the tropes by which the
colonial forces saw and interpreted women from North Africa and the Middle East. In doing this,
the “Arab” woman is not only homogenized, but is also locked in time.
Besides the critiques of Orientalist tropes, recent scholarship has challenged the
insistence on victimization by studying types of feminisms that are not recognized in the west,
analyzing Arab women on “their own terms.” That is, scholarship has focused on dispelling the
idea that Islam (and, specifically, the veil) is forced upon Muslim women against their will. In
4
Shattering the stereotype of the passive Middle Eastern woman has been achieved by so many previous scholarly
accounts: Margot Badran, Feminists, Islam, and Nation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Margot
Badran and Miriam Cooke, Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1990); Evelyn A. Early, Baladi Women of Cairo: Playing with an Egg and a Stone (Boulder:
Lynne Rienner Publisher, 1993); Elizabeth Warnock Fernea and Basima Qattan Bezirgan, A Veiled Revolution.
Video Recording. (New York: Icarus Films, 1977); Arlene MacLeod, Accommodating Protest: Working Women, the
New Veiling, and Change in Cairo. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); Brinda Mehta, Rituals of Memory
in Contemporary Arab Women’s Writing (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2007); Cynthia Nelson, Doria
Shafik, Egyptian Feminist: A Woman Apart (Gainesville: University Press of Florida,1996); Diane Singerman and
Homa Hoodfar, eds. Development, Change, and Gender in Cairo: A View from the Household (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1996)
9
“New Directions in Middle East Women’s and Gender History,” Marilyn Booth postulates that
any assessment of the academic scene in and on the MENA region has to take into account the
impact of Islam as the ground on which most political and social debate takes place. To that end,
she argues that even those who are opposed to an Islamic outlook have to begin their argument
on terrain marked out by that outlook. In addition, subverting the dominant western belief in
Islam’s resistance to modernity, scholars like Leila Ahmed and Fatima Mernissi have tackled this
issue in their works Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate and
Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society, respectively. Similarly,
Miriam Cooke’s Women Claim Islam and Anouar Majid’s study Unveiling Traditions:
Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World explode the myth of Islam as impervious to change
and to modernity by devising their own woman-centered engagements with Islamic modernity.
Lastly, Sabah Mahmood in Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject
explores the women in Egypt who were formative in the Islamic revival theorizing: “The desire
for freedom and liberation is a historically situated desire whose motivational force cannot be
assumed a priori, but needs to be reconsidered in light of other desires, aspirations, and capacities
that inhere in a culturally and historically located subject.”
5
In the same vein, in Intimate Selving
in Arab Families: Gender, Self and Identity in Arab Families, anthropologist Suad Joseph
investigates intimate relationships in families of the Arab world to argue for an alternative
construction of self that encompasses agency but does not conform to western ideas of
individuation. Within Arabic literary studies, Ellen McLarney has studied the trope of the family
in postcolonial literature of the Arab world as an allegory for the operations of the state.
6
5
Sabah Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2005) 223.
6
Ellen McLarney State of the Family: Domestic Politics in the Arabic Novel, PhD Dissertation. (Columbia, 2004)
10
This dissertation turns to a pan-generic investigation of specifically Egyptian women’s
political texts. I use the historical events of Egypt’s three revolutions -- in 1919 and 1952, against
continued British Occupation and, in 2011, against Hosni Mubarak’s dictatorship -- as the
structural framework through which to investigate the interlacing of the tropes of revolution and
domesticity in political novels, memoirs, and video blogs that respond to these crises. For, many
of the issues raised in scholarship on the Arab world, in general, and Egypt in particular, are
represented in literary texts that have provided perceptive readings of the region’s transformation
in a form, language, and idiom that are part and parcel of such transformations. Egyptian writers
and intellectuals, in Richard Jacquemond’s words, serve as the “conscience of the nation,”
7
generating much of the public discourse about the country’s domestic concerns. Reading Huda
Sha’rawi, Latifa al-Zayatt, Ahdaf Soueif, Mona Prince and Asmaa Mahfouz’s memoirs,
autobiographical novels and vlog, I dissect the ways in which discourses of domesticity are
inextricable from histories of the imagined post-revolution nation. I contend that in order to
understand women’s participation in each moment of revolution in all its complexities, nuances,
ambiguities, and messiness, domesticity has to be reworked, and reconstructed, in a form that
was meaningful to a local Egyptian milieu, and, equally, in a language that is understood by
them.
For, the imbrication of the domesticity (private, home, family, kinship) in the revolution
(the public, the political, the state and nation) appears linguistically. There is a doubling in the
term “domestic”: the OED defines “domestic” as “of or belonging to the home, house, or
household; pertaining to one's place of residence or family affairs; household, home, ‘family’”
7
The literary field in Egypt has always been the subject of much controversy. The attempted assassination in
October 1994 on Nobel Prize Winner Naguib Mahfouz by Islamists and Modern Arabic Literature Scholar Samia
Mehrez debate at the American University of Cairo for assigning Moroccan writer Muhammad Choukir’s Al-Khubz
Al-Hafi (The English translation by Paul Bowles is For Bread Alone) attests to the power of literature to stir.
11
and “of or pertaining to one's own country or nation; not foreign, internal, inland, ‘home’.” This
doubling in the definition is a rich vantage point from which to examine a number of issues
defining women’s political participation. That is, in each text, the image of the new nation is
inscribed not as external to, but as central to the happenings of the home; intimate details of the
ordinary, courtship rituals, mothering, practices of consumption, everyday cleaning, care-taking,
and kinship relations constitute a revolutionary praxis. Furthermore, the radical disruption of the
hierarchies between the domestic and the revolutionary that these text enact hinges on questions
of translation. Using translation scholar Lawrence Venuti’s theorizations of domesticating and
foreignizing techniques in the act of translation, I extend the trope of domesticity to the politics
of publication and dissemination of Arab women’s texts in the Global North. I contend that the
process of the text traveling from a domestic readership to a transnational one requires elisions,
additions, and decisions that inscribe these texts in a different history – or, at the very least, the
writers’ political activism is rendered more ambiguous. In short, the process of a wider
circulation of these texts imbues them with other evocations.
The concept of domesticity, then, functions on multiple levels throughout this project.
First, it situates the formation of revolution within the domestic space. Second, it disorganizes
the dominant categories of Egyptian women’s political participation and marks a relationship to
national belonging that – at times -- escapes legibility within western feminist concepts. And,
lastly, through focusing on strategies of domestication and foreignizing of language, it makes
language use and literacy central to articulating a revolutionary and nationalist praxis. It is at the
juncture of two fields – Arabic literary studies and postcolonial feminist theory – that this project
operates, introducing to feminist studies the specificities and ambiguities of domesticity as a
12
nationalist praxis and bringing to the reading of Arabic literature the critical perspective of
postcolonial and gender theory.
In studying the interconnectedness of revolution and domesticity I aim to steer away from
literary collusions with hegemonic readings that rely on stereotypical inaccuracies. There is a
clear discrepancy between the rich cultural production by Egyptian women writers, activists, and
scholars and the literary texts that are circulated in the Global North. This gap, I argue, is
produced and reinforced by the intricacies of the publication market. The cultural flow from the
peripheries to the center is still informed by the balance in power relations governing “first
world” and “third world” interactions.
8
The translation and publication of works produced by
“Arab women”, in general, and Egyptian women in particular, occur within a specific reception
environment – a "first world" global market that is shaped by an expectation of exoticism for
writing by and about “Arab women.” Amal Amireh and Suhair Majaj remind us in Going Global
that contexts of reception
significantly influence not only how specific works are read, but also which texts are
translated, marketed, reviewed and taught, and which issues are prioritized. Women’s
texts are thus “commodified”, as literary decisions come together with marketing
strategies and assessments of audience appeal (ranging from interest in the “exotic” to
feminist solidarity) to foreground certain texts and repackage or silence others.
9
8
I realize that the terms "First World" and "Third World" are inadequate since, as Aijaz Ahmad notes, a veritable
third world exists in the “belly of the first world’s,” I would like to use these terms to express an asymmetrical
cultural exchange.
9
Amal Amireh and Lisa Suhair Majaj Going Global: The Transnational Reception of Third World Women Writers
(New York: Garland, 2000) 4.
To give an example that highlights this commodification, I point to the cover photograph on the New York Times
Best Seller novel Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi. Nafisi’s memoir interlaces readings
of select texts from the western canon with the professor-turned-author’s experiences in the Iranian Revolution of
1978-1981 and her subsequent creation of a book club with seven of her female students. The novel’s cover features
an all together too familiar, timeless image for the predominantly western readership: two nameless young women,
with eyes averted, bend over what one assumes is one of the novels the author discusses in her memoir. The black of
the veils that frame the young women’s faces on the book cover’s cropped image dominates the image, inviting the
reader to make the connection between the women on the cover and the women in the text. However, a look at the
full, uncropped image copy of the photograph places it in time; the original photograph was captured during the
elections of the reformist Iranian President Khatami and it becomes clear that the two young girls are actively
reading a newspaper – not a canonical text – regarding the election results.
13
The reasons for the over-citation of subject matters over others can be explained by various
theories of the exotic. I use Graham Huggan’s definition of the term here. He elegantly argues
that exoticism is a system “which renders people, objects and places strange even as it
domesticates them, and which effectively manufactures otherness even as it claims to surrender
to its immanent mystery.”
10
More specifically, his theories on the influence of global capitalism
expressed in his book The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins are valuable. Studying
Anglophone novels, Huggan puts forward the thesis that the literature we have come to know as
postcolonial, “which posits itself as anti-colonial, and that works toward the dissolution of
imperial epistemologies and institutional structures” is in fact heavily influenced by what he calls
postcoloniality, which “is more closely tied to the global market, and capitalizes both on the
widespread circulation of ideas about cultural otherness and on the worldwide trafficking of
culturally ‘othered’ artifacts and goods.”
11
Using prominent postcolonial English writers as
examples, he argues that this intersection is represented in his term the “postcolonial exotic” and
suggests that a “fetishisation of cultural otherness allows metropolitan readers to exercise
fantasies of unrestricted movement and free will.”
12
He proposes that the market ultimately
dictates the place and language of these conversations, subversive or not.
In the context of “Arab women” writers, the processes of this reception demand that their
representations occupy a predefined role. Mohja Kahf contends that literary representations of
women from the Middle East and North Africa fit into three categories: either as a victim of her
oppressive culture, an escapee from it or as a pawn of Arab male power. Arab women's texts are
10
Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins, (New York: Routledge, 2001) 13.
11
Huggan 28.
12
Huggan 10.
14
thus commodified, as literary decisions cooperate with marketing strategies to foreground certain
texts and repackage or silence others.
My deployment of domesticity’s relationship with revolution as a site of analysis sets to work
underemphasized perspectives that challenge presupposed ideas about women’s role in both their
homes and their nation in revolt. Although my study is chronological, I am not presenting a
teleological history that shifts towards progress but instead focuses on what domestic
collectivities are formed in the ruptures of revolution and how this is articulated in a language
that is translatable or resistant to translation.
Domesticity’s Historical Roots
The roots of the discourse of domesticity’s in Egypt has always been imbricated in both
the political and literary terrains. It was established over a century ago, at a moment of intense
preoccupation with women and family, nation and society because of Egypt’s encounter with
Europe imposed through colonial occupation. Historian Hoda El-Saada eloquently analyzes how
the discourse of domesticity saw its genesis at the end of the 19
th
century in an elite class —
largely Syrian middle-class women educated in American, English or French missionary schools
— influenced by Western ideologies of the nuclear family and domestic life. In their journals,
they relied heavily on materials published in European and American journals about women and
women’s rights issues. In order to argue for women’s worth and improve their status, they
adopted a modernist discourse that professionalized and scientified the job of the housewife. The
emergence of the “new Arab woman” – the “modern Arab woman” – rested on her adoption of
new rules of maintaining her household. Beginning with Hind Nawfal’s journal al-Fatah,
15
women’s journals carried columns and articles devoted to instructions on housekeeping.
13
Furthermore, with the socioeconomic and technological changes in the affluent parts of Cairo
and Alexandria, domestic labor was transformed with the introduction of gas, water, and
electricity, and appliances such as the oven and sewing machine.
14
Malaka Sa’d’s manual Rabbat
al-Dar, for example, was one of the most detailed works presenting the principles of
housekeeping to an Arabic-reading audience, providing instructions on cleaning, sewing, and
cooking in an attempt to professionalize the work of the housewife and modernize the Egyptian
household.
15
This discourse of domesticity relied on the separation of the domestic space from the
political. In his seminal work, The Liberation of Women published in 1899, the elite reformer
maintained that women had to cultivate a comfortable domestic space for their nationalists
husbands.
16
Like many reformers produced in the colonial encounter, Amin linked women’s
status to the progress of the nation, arguing that it was not an “exaggeration to claim that women
13
Hind Nawfal “Bab Tadbir al-Manzil”, al-fatah 1, no. 4 (1893): 166 – 167. From Beth Baron’s The Women’s
Awakening.
14
Beth Baron, The Woman’s Awakening (New Haven: Yale University Press) 155.
Job descriptions suggested that the new woman should be “a wise diplomat in directing the affairs of her house, a
doctor capable of caring for her children’s health, a seamstress, a nurse, a teacher, and a guide.” (quoted in Beth
Baron’s The Woman’s Awakening from Labiba Hashim “Ta’lim al-banat”, fatat al-sharq 5, no. 2 (1910):45.
15
Baron 156.
Marilyn Booth presents rich detail on the contents of these journals, and particularly the use of biographies of
famous women to suggest models for young women of the future. M. Booth, “ ‘May Her Likes Be Multiplied:
‘Famous Women’ Biography and Gendered Prescription in Egypt, 1892 – 1935.” Signs 22, no. 4 (1997): 827—90.
16
Historians and anthropologists have questioned the colonial roots of Amin’s feminism: Timothy Mitchell,
Colonizing Egypt, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988): 111 – 13; Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in
Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992): 153; Mervat Hatem,
“Toward a Critique of Modernization: Narrative in Middle East Women’s Studies,” Arab Studies Quarterly 15, no. 2
(1993): 117-22; Omnia Shakry assesses the meaning of education for women, criticizing the narrative of
modernization in Omnia Shakry, “Schooled Mothers and Structured Play: Child Rearing in Tum-of-the- Century
Egypt,” Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, ed. Lila Abu- Lughod (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1998)
16
are the foundation of the towering constructs of modern civilization.”
17
He promoted women’s
rights, education and work, while promoting a western imported, modern bourgeois family
structures that idealized conjugal love and scientific child rearing, while disavowing homo-social
networks cultivated in other structures of marriage. As such, he called for the education of
women in order for them to become better mothers, capable of bringing up good citizens
required by the modern nation, and better wives for the educated, modern man. Both notions,
informed child rearing and marriage, maintain a separation between the works of domesticity and
the nationalist project. Women remained objects serving men and children. Their “traditional”
roles as wives and mothers did not afford them a space to articulate their subject position, or their
political activism.
Amin’s western influence is not the concern of my project; rather, it is his re-valuing and
re-configuring of women’s relationship to domesticity only as it pertains to men and the state
that the women writers who are the subjects of my study problematize. The first chapter of this
project examines the tension between an Arabic memoir and its English translation of Huda
Sha’rawi –Amin’s contemporary. Using domesticity as a metaphor to read unexpected sites of
political activism in the performance of household tasks such as feeding and care-taking, as well
as processes of translation, this chapter troubles Amin’s problematic formulations.
Subsequent to the 1919 Revolution, Egypt gained nominal independence. In 1936, the
Anglo-Egyptian Treaty was signed between the United Kingdom and Egypt, stipulating that the
United Kingdom would withdraw all its troops from Egypt, except those necessary to protect the
Suez Canal and its surroundings. It was intended to last twenty years. In October 1951, the new
Wafd government abrogated the treaty. Three years later, and under the leadership of Gamal
Abdel Nasser, the United Kingdom agreed to withdraw its troops in the Anglo-Egyptian
17
Amin 58.
17
Agreement of 1954. The withdrawal was completed in June 1956 and the Suez Canal was
nationalized on July 26, 1956. Some months later, France, Israel and Britain colluded to
overthrow Nasser, and the Suez Crisis ensued. Nasser also introduced “state feminism” and,
under his leadership, independent women’s organizations were suppressed. His regime abolished
fees at the university level in 1962, and as a result, many Egyptians experienced an increased
socioeconomic status. His policies of mass education and guaranteed employment for graduates,
regardless of sex, were based on a conception of woman as worker and citizen whose
participation was essential for national development.
18
The ousting of the colonial rule and the ascension of Abdel Nasser are narratavized in
Latifa al-Zayyat’s The Open Door, the subject of the second chapter of this project. This chapter
focuses on the very process through which women’s intimate roles as wives, mothers and sexual
beings intersect with national belongings. Using the home as metaphor for the nation, this
chapter suggests that women’s position within the nation does not adhere to an essentialized
model. Al-Zayyat was one of the major intellectuals of colonial and monarchical Egypt who
welcomed Nasser’s regime and believed that it would bring about her social and nationalist
aspirations. However, al-Zayyat and her colleagues gave up their political ambitions, for,
between 1953 and 1955, dozens of intellectuals -- whether liberals, communists or Muslim
Brothers -- were imprisoned.
19
In 1959, all suspected members of the Egyptian Communist Party
18
See Mervat Hatem’s “Economic and Political Liberalization in Egypt and the Demise of State Feminism,”
International Journal of Middle East Studies 24:2 (1992) and Laura Bier, Revolutionary Womanhood: Feminisms,
Modernity, and the State in Nasser’s Egypt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011) for a historical account of
these transformation.
19
Richard Jacquemond, Conscience of the Nation: Writers, State and Society in Modern Egypt, (Cairo: American
University in Cairo Press, 2008) 15.
18
had been arrested – al-Zayyat among them – following the refusal of the Party’s leaders to
dissolve it into the Single Party.
20
In the 1970’s, Nasser’s politics of mass education and employment were dismantled in
the wake of his successor Anwar Sadat’s policies. Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun chronicles the
shift between the two regimes, when students, disillusioned by the gap between the goals and the
accomplishments of the Nasser revolution, protested against the regime. Also, students
demonstrated against Sadat’s domestic and foreign policies, and witnessed his attempt to crush
these uprisings through the use of his Central Security Forces. The Egyptian domestic sphere – in
all senses of the term: the political, the familial and the practical household tasks -- was affected
by policies implemented by the country’s socioeconomic transformations of the recent past
decades. For the majority of Egyptians, the last two decades of the 20
th
century brought radical
transformations of everyday life. Politically, relying on the metaphor of the nation as a domestic
home, President Anwar Sadat’s infitah, or “open-door” policy, metaphorically and literally
opened the door of the nation to foreign investments. This reduced taxes and import tariffs for
foreign investors and exempted them from key labor laws.
21
These policies, begun in the 1970s,
reversed the processes of nationalization and state production -- the policies of restricting
imports so central to Gamal Abdel Nasser’s programs of the 1950s and 1960s, which brought
much of the economy under state control, establishing an extensive welfare system and
20
Jacquemond explains Nasser’s relationship to the press and its freedom: “while the Nasser regime would not
tolerate any kind of political opposition, it did allow for the expression of a degree of pluralism within the
ideological institutions it had established and which it controlled. The journalist Salah ‘Isa has called this ‘a game of
window-dressing,’ consisting of ‘giving a place in the press to a political or ideological group, in order that that
group might express itself, if not freely, then in a controlled way under the gaze of the authorities’ ” (17).
21
El Naggar 34.
19
guaranteeing food security.
22
With Sadat’s economic liberalization, however, Egypt was open to
foreign investment, landowners and businessmen, Western governments’ presence, and
multinational companies.
23
Massive labor migration accompanied the infitah, contributing to an
unprecedented increase in Cairo’s population. To accommodate the influx, densely populated
informal settlements sprung up all over Cairo. The UN-Habitat estimates that forty per cent of
Egypt’s inhabitants are currently located in informal areas, many concentrated in “slum pockets”
in which life is extremely unstable.
24 In turn, the government severely mismanaged the urban
development and housing needs of low--income migrants – in many cases ignoring them
entirely. As a result, while profits increased for the political and economic elite, workers
throughout Egypt were facing intolerable conditions, suffering from a wave of corrupt
privatization schemes and widespread layoffs, stagnant salaries and wages, widespread
corruption and rising inflation.
25 The gap between the rich and the poor increasingly widened,
and forty percent of Egyptians lived under the poverty line, which is marked by an income of
less than two dollars a day.
26
22
Rabab El-Mahdi, Rabab, and Philip Marfleet, Egypt: The Moment of Change, (London ;New York: Zed Books,
2009) 4.
23
Sadat worked closely with advisors from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the United
States Agency for International Development (USAID). This heavily affected domestic lives. One example occurred
in January 1997, when Sadat’s government faced massive protests over IMF-inspired cuts to subsidies of foods and
fuel – an ‘intifada of bread’ against which he mobilized the full force of the army. (El Mahdi and Marfleet 3)
24
Rabab and Marfleet’s research details how vast areas of informal housing have been constructed without adequate
infrastructure and without supervision, with the result that buildings collapse because of inappropriate design,
misuse of materials and/or corrupt relationships among property developers and officials. In both 2007 and 2008
hundreds of people were killed in Alexandria when apartment blocks collapsed. In 2008 a rockfall in the Cairo
district of Duweiqua killed over a hundred residents living in slum housing: local people blamed the effects of
uncontrolled property development nearby. Duweiqua was flooded with police in efforts to inhibit protest. Law
enforcement was similarly called in to quell protests in the case of fire in the central, popular Cairo district of
Sayyida Zeinab in 2007: after 300 shacks had been destroyed, leaving 1000 people homeless, protestors were
attacked by riot police (6 -7).
25
Over a few weeks in 2008, fifteen people died in fights among people competing for aysh baladi – the loaves
which are vital for survival of the mass of Egyptians (Rebab and Marfleet 2).
26
Manar Shorbagy, "Understanding Kefaya: The New Politics in Egypt," Arab Studies Quarterly 29.1 (2007) 91.
20
The effects of these political shifts were various. The goals of establishing a domestic
life, both in the sense of buying a home and financially providing for a family and children, were
stymied by the economic inequities that plagued the country. In Egyptian society, marriage is the
institutional and cultural path for societal recognition and sexual activity. Diane Singerman notes
that marriage in Egypt (and much of the Arab world) is what initiates young people into
adulthood and, thus, “if young people continue to feel like perpetual adolescents –
disempowered, excluded from society, and economically vulnerable – the region will suffer
economically and politically.”
27
Rania Salem, who studies the consequences of high marriage
costs in Egypt, notes that a groom on average has to save his entire earnings for about three and a
half years to finance his share of costs for a wedding (a groom and his parents typically provide
housing in a marriage), while the average bride has to save for six months for hers.
28
But given
the paucity of well-paid jobs, men have to wait longer. For women, the process can be
frustrating, since being unmarried beyond a certain age results in social stigmatization. Madiha
El Shafty, a professor at the American University of Cairo summarizes the status of marriage
conditions, “The inability to marry is an overlooked crisis that keeps escalating in Egypt. It’s not
hard to understand how this mass frustration can lead to intense religiosity, and how it can
contribute to the country’s rampant issue of sexual harassment.”
29
Moreover, the bleak economic conditions resulted in a shortage in housing, which
27
Quoted in Laua Bohn, "Egypt's Marriage Crisis: Sons and Daughters Too Broke To Be Married, Waiting For
Adulthood," Egypt: Waiting to Marry. Pulitzer Center on Crisis
Reporting, 8 Dec. 2013.
28
Rania Salem, Economies of Courtship: Matrimonial Transactions and the Construction of Gender and Class
Inequalities in Egypt, PhD Dissertation (Princeton University, 2011) 3.
29
As quoted in Laura Bohn’s “Egypt’s Marriage Crisis: Sons and Daughters too Broke to be Married, Waiting for
Adulthood,” Egypt: Waiting to Marry, Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, (December 2013).
21
hindered young men’s (even the minority who possessed the financial means) ability to marry or
secure a bride. At the start of the 2011 revolution, nearly two-thirds of people from the ages of
18-29 who had only a secondary school education were unemployed, and one-third of those who
had a university degree were unable to find a job. In a 2006 Egyptian national survey, 83 percent
of all the unemployed fell between the ages of fifteen and twenty-nine.
30
Without a job, young
people could not marry and had to continue living with their parents.
31
This contributed to an
even more disempowered generation, one that proved a pivotal force behind the country’s initial
uprising. With the looming “election” of Gamal Mubarak, Hosni Mubarak’s son, the country,
specifically Cairo, the densely populated locus of activity, was poised to erupt in revolt. The
younger generation’s inability to achieve the domestic roles that were expected of them to reach
their social standing was a large impetus for the 2011 revolution.
Under economic conditions starkly influencing the very fabric of domestic life, silenced
by the oppressive security regime, young Egyptians took to the streets on January 25
th
, 2011 to
call for Mubarak to step down. To call the nation to action, and to envision a new nation free
from the oppressive rulers of the past, women writers and activists strategically employed their
understandings of the nation as home. Ziad Fahmy validates this strategy arguing that the most
effective way that national identity and a sense of nationhood are absorbed is through mundane
media portrayals and representations of everyday “national” life. In Banal Nationalism, Michael
Billig claims that nationalist ideology “might appear banal, routine, almost invisible,” but these “
‘subconscious’ matter-of-fact representations create a commonsense ‘naturalness of belonging to
30
Mona Amer, The Egyptian Youth Labor Market, School-to-Work Transition, 1998-2006.
Presentation at Dissemination Conference, The Population Council, Cairo, October 30. 11.
31
Tim Sullivan and Sean F. McMahon, “Youth Power and the Revolution,” Egypt’s Tahrir Revolution, eds. Dan
Tschirgi and Walid Kazziha (Boulder: Lynne Rinner, 2013) 69.
22
a nation.’”
32
A Century of Revolutions
These historical contexts reveal that the terms that frame my project – revolution and domesticity
– are multiple and unstable, uncontained and uncontainable, even within the same historical
period being narrated. Revolutions mark a systemic, governmental, and political failure,
bringing to light the fact that the machineries of power have become so corrupt, that the only
strategy left to begin a process of change is mass social action. Invisible power is forced to
become visible, altering balances of power. However, there is no clear temporal end and no clear
beginning to a revolution. It stems from failure and represents hope. It is a moment of rupture
and violence and joy. It operates, or stems from paradoxes. This, too, is made apparent
etymologically. For, just as there is a doubling in the word “domestic” there is also a doubling in
the word “revolution.” Raymond Williams reminds us that the English word has undergone a
number of changes since it first appeared in the English language. On the one hand, there is the
sense of revolution as a sudden and radical change -- our present-day sense of the word. But,
beneath it, there is an older sense of revolution as return, as coming back around. The newer
sense is rooted in an understanding of historical time as developmental and linear, with the
capacity to be broken or transcended, while the older sense is embedded in cyclical notions of
time, of history as recurrence. It denies the possibility of total rupture with the past. This
dissertation maintains the tension between the two terms which contributes to the heterogeneity
of the historical narrative. However, by no means do I see these revolutions as complete, linear,
or even narratable.
In English, the etymology of the terms “revolution” and “domesticity” expresses an, at
times, unresolvable tension. In Arabic, there is an intralinguistic tension that I maintain as a
32
Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism, (London: Sage, 1995) 15 – 16.
23
necessary site of exploration. In all Arab countries, there are linguistic dissonances between
everyday spoken colloquial variations of Arabic and fusha, or Modern Standard Arabic (MSA),
which is the predominant language of written discourse. Diglossia––strictly defined as variety
within the same language––is a major characteristic of the langauge. There is a difference
between fusha, and ‘ammiyya, the language of everyday spoken communication. Whereas every
Egyptian would understand ‘ammiyya, only the formally educated minority would be able to read
and speak fusha. To further understand the intimate communities created when speaking (and
writing) in ‘ammiyya and fusha, linguistic anthropologist Niloofar Haeri details her interaction
with an Egyptian teacher who shares: “When I speak in ‘ammiyya, it is from me to you
directly…. The Arabic language is not difficult, but, well, ‘ammiyya is the dialect of life. If I
spoke to you in fusha, that takes time and it is not normal/reasonable that we speak like that to
each other.”
33
‘ammiyya is the language of al-sha’b; literally, the language of the populace.
Other people Haeri interviews describe ‘ammiyya as the language for face-to-face interactions,
unlike fusha. Another interviewee explains: “The language of ‘ammiyya is easier and faster and
reaches the heart and the conscience faster than the Arabic language. [fusha] is not ‘ala tuul’,
direct, or from one person immediately to his or her interlocutor. Whereas Classical Arabic is
mediated through grammar classes, sheikhs, and teachers, schools, reading and writing.”
34
‘ammiyya is the predominant language of relations in the family, between close friends, among
colleagues, with neighbors, with “home people” – anyone, in short, with whom one can assume a
certain level of familiarity, unmediated by structural standards.
35
The intrinsic definitional
33
Niloofar Haeri, Sacred Languages, Ordinary People: Dilemmas of Culture and Politics in Egypt, (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) 38.
34
Ibid., (emphasis mine, 39).
35
For the debate about publishing in ‘ammiyya, see Niloofar Haeri, “Persistent Dilemmas: Pleasure, Power and
Ambiguity” in Sacred Languages, Ordinary People: Dilemmas of Culture and Politics in Egypt, (New York:
24
hierarchy differentiating fusha and ‘ammiyya is clear: fusha is reified as a clear (pure) and
eloquent language with a Qur’anic and classical pedigree, whereas ‘ammiyya is regarded as the
common language of the masses and everyday life.
36
An exemplary case of this linguistic variation is to be found in the political speeches of
Gamal Abdel Nasser. He used to begin his speeches in fusha, spoken slowly and rhythmically.
His sentences would become gradually more and more colloquial, spoken in a faster tempo, until
he reached a purely colloquial level. At the end of this speech, he would conclude with a few
sentences in pure fusha.
37
Speeches in the Egyptian parliament are often given in something
approaching to colloquial language, which would be unheard of in other Arab countries. An
interesting example is the last speech given by Anwar Sadat in parliament in 1981. The day after
his assassination, it appeared in the newspapers in a colloquial version, with a note by the
publisher that there had been no time to “translate” it into standard language. The pattern
described there does not occur in any of the speeches which he gave abroad. The reasons are that
any suggestion of Egyptian nationalism would have endangered the already tense relations with
Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) 113-141. Also see Samah Selim, The Novel and the Rural Imaginary in Egypt, 1880-
1985 (New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004) 21-22 and Samia Mehrez, “ Children of our alley: the AUC Naguib
Mahfouz Award and the Egyptian literary Field,” Egypt’s Culture Wars: Politics and Practice, (London: Routledge,
2008) 41—57.
Haeri translates Osman Sabri in the epigraph of her concluding chapter,
“Egyptian Arabic was created by our fathers and grand-parents and we suckled it like the milk of our mothers. We
learned it while we were still young and pronounced in it the first words that left our mouths. We remained speaking
it throughout our lives, at home, in the field, at the factory and in offices, at the market and the university until it
mixed with our blood and satiated us and we began to love it just like we love our fathers and mothers. We add
something new to it everyday, and in doing so we feel that we are perfecting it – we educate it and bring it up as if it
were our daughter and we grow to love it like we love our children. Our love for it is twofold: the love for our
parents and the love for our children.”
36
For an examination of the role of the Arabic language in forming a national identity, see Yasir Suleiman, The
Arabic Language and National Identity: A Study in Ideology (Washington D.C.: Georgetown University Press,
2003).
37
Ibid., 250.
25
other countries in the region.
38
This combination of fusha and ‘ammiyya has been a perennial subject of debate among
the Egyptian literati. Writers like Yusuf Idris and Yahya Haqqi have chosen to write in a
combination of fusha or ‘ammiyya to articulate their politics. In 1956, Tawfiq al-Hakim
published a play in which he attempted to approximate the colloquial language by stretching the
limits of classical syntax and finding commonalities between formal and colloquial
expressions.
39
Women writers have also experimented with incorporating Egyptian colloquialism
in their fiction. Etidal Osman’s works are marked by vocabulary of Sufi texts, while she
experiments with representing women’s speech. Ibtihal Salem explores the effects of increasing
consumerism, capitalism and war upon women. A colloquialism and proverbs that distinguish
women’s speech figure prominently in her fiction. Salwa Bakr, for example, has stated that her
ultimate goal is to develop a style that meets with the standards of fusha but at the same time
conveys the ways in which women (particularly uneducated women)
40
speak. In chapter three of
this dissertation, I explore how Ahdaf Soueif inserts herself in this debate, by self-translating
Egyptian dialect to mark her affective belonging to a changing political terrain. The lacunae
which arise from the missing connotation in the English translation is of the greatest magnitude,
for it has been read by literary critics as an indication of Soueif’s inability to write in English. I,
instead, argue that Soueif does not submit to a culturally constructed concept of an acceptable
form of national language and national belonging.
38
Suleiman 251.
39
Pierre Cachia, An Overview of Modern Arabic Literature, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1990).
40
Caroline Seymour-Jorn explores this thoughtfully in her book Cultural Criticism in Egyptian Women’s Writing,
(New York: Syracuse University Press, 2011). Also, Mushira Eid “Language is a Choice: Variation in Egyptian
Women’s Written Discourse,” Language Contact and Language conflict in Arabic, ed. Aleya Rouchdy (New York:
RoutledgeCurzon, 2002).
26
The implications of the tension between spoken Egyptian and Modern Standard Arabic
and the need to “translate” between them is part and parcel of the political project that I begin to
articulate here – between the classes of the Egyptian intelligentsia who have access to both fusha
and ‘ammiyya as well as perhaps English, and the relations of power between the Egyptian
author and her English translator. Of no fault of the translator, because of the diglossic nature of
the Arabic language, much is inevitably lost in translation. In al-Zayyat’s works, for example, the
differences between Modern Standard Arabic and the Egyptian dialect that coexist in her Arabic
novels – which, I argue calls forth a specific, non-elite Egyptian readership – disappear when
they are translated into English. Importantly, however, al-Zayyat’s work is no longer printed in
Arabic and is only circulated in English because of its translation by the American University
Cairo (AUC). When the AUC sought to award the book the Naguib Mahfouz Prize in Literature,
which, Samia Mehrez explains “extends the legitimacy of established writers to the international
level,” some of its staunch opponents stigmatized its recipients, accusing the award of being
“anti-national” because it is housed in an American University.
41
Because of a combination of
low literacy rates, the cronyism of the publishing market and lack of government funding for
publishing houses in parts of the Arab world, al-Zayyat’s work, among other texts I study, are
predominantly alive in English translation. This vexed tension between the national and the
transnational investments in the novels exposes how these texts are multiply worlded.
In restoring the prior text as central to the discussion of its English translation, and in
tracing the ways in which representations of domesticity shift from “original” to “remake,” I ask
what is both lost and gained in this process of translation. Reading these texts and their
translations may seem to run the risk of reifying the binary between copy and original. However,
41
Samia Mehrez,“ Children of our alley: the AUC Naguib Mahfouz Award and the Egyptian literary Field,” Egypt’s
Cultural Wars: Politics and Practice, (London: Routledge, 2008) 45.
27
I maintain that the “original” text and its translation gain meaning in relation to one another. The
writers I study choose a variety of linguistic registers: only Modern Standard Arabic (in
Sha’rawi’s case) or a mixture of dialogue in the Egyptian dialect and Modern Standard (as in
Latifa Al-Zayyat’s case) or a creolization of the English language with Arabic, as in Ahdaf
Soueif’s case. The heterogeneity of these materials produces discontinuities in the translation
that alert the reader to important elisions. These discontinuities may be evident on the level of
syntax, diction or discourse. Translation here cannot be seen as a mimetic reflection of a prior
text but rather as a productive activity that instantiates new analysis of domesticity even as it
effaces earlier arrangements.
Translation occupies the crossing point of discourse and power. Historically, in Egypt,
processes of translations were mired in nationalists project, and were sponsored by the state.
Translation projects constructed, consolidated and promoted an Egyptian national identity.
Translation from European languages in modern Egypt began in the years 1830-40 as one of the
means used by which Muhammad Ali’s state attempted to close the intellectual and technical gap
between Egypt and Europe. Understanding the urgency of mastering European languages for
political purposes, Ali sent a mission of Egyptian students to French, under the supervision of
Rifa’a al-Tahtawi, who founded upon his return to Egypt the School of Languages, where he
trained the first generation of Egyptian translators. A survey of the translations published at the
time reveals that it was used to bolster the young Egyptian state, rather than a reflection of an
interest in European culture.
42
These translations consisted most frequently in an unsystemic
transposition of the French narrative and actually. It was not called “translation” (tarjama) but
“adaption” (iqtibas), “arabization” (tar’ib) or even “Egyptianization” (tamsir). The European
42
Richard Jacquemond, “Translation and Cultural Hegemony: The Case of French-Arabic Translation,” Rethinking
Translation, ed. Lawrence Venuti, (London: Routledge, 1992) 140.
28
text was completely transformed into something familiar to the Arab readership in its style, form
and content. This appears in the titles of translated works: the French titles were often
“Arabized” to catch the Arabic reader’s attention, either in the Arabic trade tradition of rhymed
titles or in a more modern fashion.
43
This coincided with the emergence of a local Occidentalized elite who mastered foreign
languages and consumed books primarily written in French or English. However, the Arabic
language was never banned from education, a factor which allowed for the presence of a strong
Arabic book market in Egypt throughout the colonial period and, consequently, opened up a
limited space for translation. In other words, in Egypt, “the split between national and imported
cultures was never complete, so that Western intellectual production could be integrated through
and by the national language.”
44
Given this historical context, what my project reveals, without assuming an automatic
congruence of experience based on linguistic commensurability, is that each text constructs
translation as the site of multiple determinations– linguistic, cultural, ideological, political and
feminist. Only by taking a step back from the immediate language transfer process, and by taking
the larger institutions involved in cultural construction into consideration can we begin to see the
nature of the role translations play in cultural construction. This heterogeneous linguistic context
is important in my reading of the Arabic version of Sha’rawi’s memoir, for example, which was
composed entirely in Modern Standard Arabic, even the samples of dialogue that she exchanged
with the nationalist Sa’ad Zaghloul. I argue that this language choice is inherent to her nationalist
43
Some of these adaptions were done so successfully that their author grew much more famous than the French
author: for example, those of Mustafa Al-Manfaluti (1876-1924) have been constantly reprinted in Egypt and other
Arab countries throughout this century, while nobody, with the exception of a few scholars, remembers the names of
their original authors. (Jacquemond)
44
Jacquemond 142.
29
project since she spoke French and Turkish, and Arabic was the third language that she learned.
As a result, a polyvocality, and a multilingualism gets erased and silenced
Indeed, not only do I consider translation between Modern Standard Arabic and dialect
but I also think of the different lives that a text takes when it is translated into English
specifically. Here, I find Mona Baker’s definitions of translation especially valuable. She uses
“translation” in both its narrow and its broad senses. Baker illuminates that in its narrow sense,
translation “involves rendering fully articulated stretches of textual material from one language
into another, and encompasses various modalities such as written translation, subtitling and oral
interpreting.”
45
In its broader sense, she argues, translation involves the
mediation of diffuse symbols, experiences, narratives and linguistic signs of varying
lengths across modalities (words into image, lived experience into words), levels and
varieties of languages (Modern Standard Arabic and spoken Egyptian, for example), and
cultural spaces, the latter without necessarily crossing language boundary.
46
Focusing upon the ways in which women use language itself also helps us understand how they
deal with what Joseph Zeidan has described as two linguistic obstacles that arise when women
write in Arabic. First, Arabic literature has been subject to an ideology that holds the classical
Arabic language to be sacred and inhibits changes in the formal language. Second, Arabic (like
many languages) is a patriarchal language, and therefore women must change this language
significantly in order to find their voices.
47
Translation, thus, emerges as a political act that is
negotiated within the spaces that lie between cultures and language, between the local and the
global, between the translatable and the untranslatable.
The trope of the domestic, domesticity, and the act of domesticating all serve to bridge
45
Mona Baker, “Beyond the Spectacle,” Translating Dissent: Voices from and with the Egyptian Revolution, ed.
Mona Baker (New York and London: Routledge, 2016) 7.
46
Ibid.
47
Joseph Zeidan, Arab Women Novelists. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995) 2.
30
the gap between the two tenets of my argument – one attentive to the textual analysis of cultural
presentations of the domestic sphere and its relation to a revolutionary moment. Given that
domesticity was historically considered incompatible with the revolutionary spirit, as echoed in
the beginning of this chapter, it is important to expand the value of the discourses of domesticity
and to make evident the need to account for alternative sites of political activism in women’s
spheres. Throughout, I remain attentive to the various levels of domesticating a colloquial Arabic
in Modern Standard Arabic, or Arabic into English.
Chapter Breakdown
Through a mixture of historical and textual analysis that attends to matters of genre, market,
narrative strategy and reception, chapter one, “Domesticating the Revolutionary: Between
Mudhkirati Huda Sha’rawi and Harem Years” reveals Huda Sha’rawi’s memoirs to be a story of
movement: linguistic, generic and temporal, as well as – most notably -- political. Mohja Kahf
famously argued that Harem Years: the Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist, Margot Badran’s
translation of the Egyptian political activist and feminist Sha’rawi’s memoirs appears into an
already commodified literary representation of Arab women’s lives. Kahf contends that Badran,
under the pressures of the publishing market, translates the Arabic text to fit into a “horizon of
expectation” where Arab woman is either a “victim, escapee or pawn.”
48
Sha’rawi’s Arabic
memoirs, on the other hand, gathers, records and reports stories which makes up the memory of a
generation, and a nation. Dictating them to her secretary, Abd al-Hamid Fahmy Mursi, she
translates them into a medium that promises to be permanent: the printed word.
This chapter concerns itself with how the Arabic version is also informed by the source
48
Mohja Kahf, “Packaging ‘Huda’: Sha'rawi's Memoirs in the United States Reception Environment,” Going
Global: The Transnational Reception of Third World Women Writers, eds. Amal Amireh and Lisa Suhair Majaj,
(New York: Garland, 2000) 149,150.
31
culture’s social determinations and – not unlike the English version -- caters to homogenizing
tendencies. For, the bulk of the Arabic (which is heavily minimized in the translation) narrates
Sha’rawi’s political participation as a nationalist and as a feminist on the national and
international stages through transcriptions of official government statements, public speeches,
and newspaper articles. The heterogeneity of the Arabic version, the very intertextuality that is
its striking feature is rich with complexity. On the one hand, it exposes the extent of Sha’rawi’s
access to key public figures – male and female, political and religious – and the variety of
prominent political figures with whom she was an interlocutor. On the other hand, it underlines
her adoption of a standard, masculine language and voice.
Analyzing fissures in the Arabic text as a whole, the context and conditions in which it
was published, the rules of standardization of Arabic at the time of the 1919 Revolution, and the
adoption of the newspaper to ventriloquize a male nationalist voice at the time, this chapter
exposes how the Arabic version is an equally mediated text. I argue that Sha’arawi’s Mudhakirat
takes up a position within the domestic sphere to emphasize the author’s intergenerational, elite,
nationalist lineage both prior to and after the 1919 Revolution. Her descriptions of care-taking
rituals affirm her elite socioeconomic status and validate her position as an international
representative of Egypt. The decisions made in the English translation insist on Orientalist
depictions of the harem as both a space of frivolity and of oppression. That is, the movement of
the Arabic to English, as Kahf argues, places it into the genre of harem literature; while, I
contend, in the political section of the Arabic version, the decentering of the authorial voice
through this intertextuality denudes an interiority. Both rely on a silencing, curtailing, mediation
and elisions. Collapsing the hierarchy between “original” and “translation” exposes how “other”
cultures are equally engaged in the contradictions inherent in representing a political figure.
32
Chapter 2, “Home as Metaphor for the Nation-State in Latifa al-Zayyat’s The Open Door
and The Owner of the House,” postulates that although the heroines as wives’ level of devotion
to the political cause shift from absolute dedication in The Open Door to complete
disillusionment in The Owner of the House, their consistent commitment to their dutiful roles as
wives to their revolutionary husbands affords them a level of agency that allows them to resist
hegemonic demands of either the family, or the nation. Marriage and domestic life function as a
metaphor for the heroines’ position within the nation, and their shifting relationship to the
domestic space reveals their position within the nation-state.
These novels cannot be analyzed without reference to their form and time of publication.
Although no longer printed in Arabic, The Open Door is considered to be the first novel written
by a woman featuring the Egyptian dialect and extensive passages of dialogue, making it very
accessible to a wide, specifically Egyptian readership, and, as a result, firmly placing this project
in a nationalist setting. The importance of this placement remains pertinent today as is evidenced
by al-Zayyat’s supporters’ reactions to her being awarded the AUC Naguib Mahfouz Award.
Sayyid al Bahrawi, Professor of Arabic Literature at Cairo University declared that he believed
that had al-Zayyat been awarded the prize during her lifetime she would have refused it. He
argued that the name of the American University in Cairo that is attached to the award smeared
the award, the Arab novel and Arabic literature in general given the institutions “antagonistic
position toward Arab national culture.”
49
Thus, knowing the resistance, even posthumously, to
being assimilated by “Western support” uncovers one possible reason for the difficulty of
breaking the Orientalist epistemologies that dominate writing by women from the Middle East
and North Africa.
49
Quoted in Mehrez, Egypt’s Culture Wars: Politics and Practice, 47.
33
Egyptian writer and political activist Ahdaf Soueif’s English novel In the Eye of the Sun
is the object of study in the third chapter of this disseratation. The novel spans the years 1967 to
1980, and intertwines the private lives of Asya al-Ulama and her family with the political
unfoldings of the time -- Egypt’s suffering the defeat in the Six-Day War, the end of ‘Abd el-
Nasser’s pan-Arabism and the beginning of Anwar Sadat’s neoliberalist economic policies. This
chapter argues that embedded in the novel’s detailing of the intimate lives of the al-Ulama family
are alternative sites of political activism within women’s spheres. Investigating episodes of
laughter and rituals of caregiving in non-biological and biological kinship structures, I contend
that these serve as unexpected sites of collective political resistance to the pains of national
defeat (during the Nasser era) and economic exploitation (during Sadat’s era).
Furthermore, I posit that understanding the politics of reception of Soueif’s writing
invigorates the politics of resistance within the novel. To this end, this chapter also considers
Soueif’s choice in writing in English through readings of scenes of staged incommensurability
between Arabic and English, specifically the politics of Soueif’s decision of domesticating and
foreignizing translations. I argue that the domesticating of Egyptian political history within the
English canon is a form of interpellation, a hailing of an Anglophone audience to witness the
modern day effects of English colonialism, which also marks the narrator’s oblique angle of
access to her own sense of national belonging. While her foreignizing strategies, specifically of
an Egyptian dialect, ensure that there is a level of affective interaction in her text to which a non-
Egyptian readership is not privy. Alternating between foreignizing and domesticating techniques
denote Asya’s own conflicted position as a narrator of Egyptian modern history outside of a
colonial moment. For, domesticating the story in the English language, and writing in English in
general, indicate her own position as an outsider – by virtue of class, education, language and
34
location -- while at the same time her familiarity with the language, evidenced in her foreignizing
techniques, mark her as a member of an intimate linguistic community. Given the political
context in which the novel is set, these shifting translation decisions present a non-totalizing
story of national belonging, and contest the generalizing, sensationalizing rhetoric of the genre of
Arab women writers (of which Soueif was accused after the publication of her first collection of
short stories, Aisha) troubling any essentializing representation of Arab women. Together, the
alternative sites of activism within women’s spheres as well as the staging of linguistic
incommensurability serve as a counter-narrative to the regulating demands of the hegemonic
powers.
Chapter four is a pan-generic study of Egyptian women’s cultural productions during the
2011 Tahrir Revolution. I examine the vision of the nation conceptualized by Egyptian women,
across class, by analyzing the writer Mona Prince’s self-published 2012 memoir Revolution is my
Name ( ﻲﻣﺳا وروﺛ /ismi thoura) and the political activist Asmaa Mahfouz’s vlog. Attentive to the
projected audience of each medium, I study how the trope of domesticity -- the intimate domain
of marriage and family life, household tasks such as cooking, cleaning and care-taking -- is
deployed to position women within the imagined post-revolution nation. In my analysis, I argue
that domesticity is embedded in discourses of class and religious affiliation. With these
discourses in mind, I then analyze how domesticity is differently articulated in a third genre —
unscripted, oral interviews — as a means of exposing the exclusionary praxis of the nation. In
my analysis, I argue that domesticity is embedded in discourses of class and religious affiliation.
With these discourses in mind, I then analyze how domesticity is differently articulated in a third
genre — unscripted, oral interviews — as a means of exposing the exclusionary praxis of the
revolutionary nation.
35
I have chosen to foreground the influences of domesticity on the articulation of a
revolutionary politics because it tends to be suppressed in dominant debates on women’s work
where women’s domestic roles are pointed to as an affirmation of their traditional cultural roles
while their participation in the public sphere only began in 2011. Analyzing the domestic space
as a site of political activism, and as a way of imagining the nation under revolt, the authoritative
narrative is constantly challenged from within: from other competing tellings of not quite the
same story. More importantly, what these narratives suggest is that in spite of the boundary
fixations that specific nationalisms in crisis would call forth, women often negotiate that
nationalism and its boundaries in far more various and inventive ways than are studied. Attention
to the ways women narrate the stories in which they are involved is, then, as important as
attention to the stories they tell.
36
CHAPTER ONE:
DOMESTICATING THE REVOLUTIONARY: BETWEEN MUDHAKKIRAT HUDA
SHA’RAWI AND HAREM YEARS
“The Nation consists of a group of families. And if the families that make up the nation are
enlightened, refined, rich, strong, then so too will the nation be all of those things. And if those
families are possessing of fallen morals, if they are poor, if they are uneducated, then the nation,
like those families, will be corrupt, poor and backwards.”
--‘Abd al-Aziz Hasan Durus al-akhlaq al-muqadara ‘ala tulab al-sana al-ula. (1913)
1
Introduction
Harem Years: the Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist (1879-1924), Margot Badran’s translation of
the Egyptian political activist and feminist Huda Sha’rawi’s
2
Arabic memoirs – and the only
English translation that exists -- appears into an already commodified literary representation of
Arab women’s lives. One review of Badran’s translation reads Harem Years evidently, rather
than critically, describing Sha’rawi heroicism: “a child and a woman in the household, she had to
overcome the burden of the ordinary.”
3
Another reviewer suggests that “nonspecialist” readers
would need “further discussion of polygamy and concubinage… These are exotic notions to a
Western reader. They were, however, the source of serious problems for Sha’rawi – who left her
husband because of his attachment to a concubine – ….”
4
Yet another reviewer praises the
translation for exposing to the English reader a “different life that is bound to fascinate.”
According to his understanding, what is “bound to fascinate” in early twentieth century Egypt, is
the fact that the “sexes were strictly segregated, the women living their lives within the private
1
As quoted in Lisa Pollard, “Learning Gendered Modernity,” Beyond the Exotic: Women’s Histories in Islamic
Societies, ed. Amira El-Azhary Sonbol (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2005) 261.
2
Her name is written in the following other ways: Sha’arawi and Shaarawi.
3
Earl L. Sullivan,“Huda Shaarawi, "Harem Years: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist (1879-1924),
"International Journal of Middle East Studies 21.424 (Summer 1989): 426.
4
Emphasis added
Elizabeth Bergman, “Shorter Notices: Harem Years,” Washington 42 (1988): 524.
37
enclosures of the ‘women’s quarters,’ the harem.”
5
He then dramatically concludes that, “slowly
out of the harem, the revolutionary is born... In a final gesture when she stands at the Cairo train
station in 1923 surrounded by the traditional crowd of women covered in long black cloaks and
throws off her veil it is clear that Egypt – and its women—have turned a dramatic corner.”
6
Continuing in the same vein that sees political activism as incongruent with Sha’arawi’s
domestic life, yet another reviewer posits that “Huda’s long separation from her husband
catapulted her entry into politics”
7
and that her sociopolitical activities transformed her from a
“brooding, melancholic child, languishing in the interiors of the harem to a pioneering figure in
the social and political history of Egypt.”
8
An all too familiar theme threads these reviews: that which sees Egyptian women’s
domestic life – here, specifically, represented in the harem -- as exotic, as a source of oppression,
and, most significantly, as impervious to revolution and inhospitable to political agency. Thus,
Badran’s translation is comfortably inserted into a tenacious Orientalist discourse – one of Arab
women’s confinement, isolation, sequestration. The resultant heroicisation of Sha’rawi in the
English version of the text -- predicated on her rejection of her “harem years” – obfuscates the
interrelatedness of Sha’rawi’s domestic life and her political activism that takes prominent
position in her Arabic memoir and that was very much embedded in the fabric of the Egyptian
nationalist movement at the turn of the last century. Thus, Sha’rawi’s efforts to develop a
localized political activism, the germs of which are instilled in her in her home -- are evacuated
from the translation to make way for the allure of the harem.
5
Jo Franklin-Trout, “Nonfiction,” Chicago Tribune 2 (July 26 1987): 5.
6
Ibid., 11.
7
S.Asha, “ The Intersection of the Personal and the Political: Huda Shaarawi’s Harem Years and Leila Ahmed’s A
Boarder Passage,” IUP Journal of English Studies 7.2 (2012): 33.
8
Asha 34.
38
In this chapter, I read the Arabic and the English version of the texts in tandem to
disorganize a binaristic understanding of them, for each text caters to its unique domestic
audience. Harem Years details Sha’rawi’s childhood, her marriage to her paternal and much
older cousin Ali Sha’rawi, her formative familial relationships of devotion and reciprocity -- her
relationships with her brother, and her father’s first wife, as well as other very close bonds with
Egyptian and French women from her social milieu. These details comprise the main text of the
English translation, while the rest of the Arabic text is not translated. That is, a substantial
segment of the Arabic text narrates Sha’rawi’s political participation as a nationalist and as a
feminist on the national and international stages through transcriptions of official government
statements, public speeches, and newspaper articles. The heterogeneity of the Arabic version, the
very intertextuality that is its striking feature, is rich with complexity. On the one hand, it
exposes the extent of Sha’rawi’s access to key public figures – male and female, political and
religious – and the variety of prominent political figures with whom she was an interlocutor. On
the other hand, it underlines her adoption of a standard, masculine language and voice.
Analyzing the adoption of the newspaper to ventriloquize a male nationalist voice, the rules of
standardization of Arabic at the time of the 1919 revolution, and the fissures in the Arabic text as
a whole, this article exposes how the Arabic version is as equally mediated as the English text.
Both rely on a silencing, curtailing, mediation and elisions. Both accede to homogenizing
tendencies. That is, the Arabic version, faithful to the generic expectations of a memoir, caters to
the homogenizing narratives of early twentieth century Egyptian nationalism. While, the English
version, as previous scholarship has uncovered, speaks to a contemporary Anglophone audience
invested in the reproduction of images of the exotic east. Translation theorist Lawrence Venuti’s
deployment of the trope of domesticating is a valuable framework. He theorizes,
39
The aim of translation is to bring back a cultural other as the same, the recognizable even
the familiar; and this aim always risks a wholesale domestication of the foreign text,
often in highly self-conscious projects, where translation serves as an imperialist
appropriation of foreign cultures for domestic agendas, cultural, economic, political.
9
I am not presenting the Arabic version as the rediscovered native voice. Here, I agree
with Venuti convincing argument, echoing Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man’s deconstructive
theorizations of translation,
Neither the foreign text nor the translation is an original semantic unity; both are
derivative and heterogeneous, consisting of diverse linguistic and cultural materials
which destabilize the work of signification, making meaning plural and differential,
exceeding and possibly conflicting with the intentions of the foreign writer and the
translator. Poststructuralist textuality redefines the notion of equivalence in translation by
assuming from the outset that the differential plurality in every text precludes a simple
correspondence of meaning, that a ratio of loss and gain inevitably occurs during the
translation process and situates the translation in an equivocal, asymptotic relationship to
the foreign text.
10
Although bringing Sha’rawi’s Arabic text back into circulation is one of the aims of this project,
this exercise is not simply one of recovering of a native voice. Indeed, both the Arabic and the
English versions are plural, polyvocal, and intertextual. However, the lack of accord between the
two versions exposes gaps in understanding of Egyptian feminist political activism that do not
adhere to a separation between domestic and revolutionary politics. Both engage in acts of
translation – Sha’rawi translates a polyglot, multi-classed language into a standardized Arabic,
eclipsing a linguistic and classed heterogeneity, while Badran translation decisions eclipse
Sha’rawi’s political life. Here, Venuti’s postulations in regards to the violence of translation are
apt for both works. He writes
9
Lawrence Venuti, “Translation as Cultural Politics,” Critical Readings in Translation Studies, ed. Mona Baker
(London and New York: Routledge, 2009) 68.
10
Lawrence Venuti, “Introduction,” Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology (London and New
York: Routledge, 1992) 7-8.
40
Translation can be described as an act of violence against a nation only because
nationalist thinking tends to be premised on a metaphysical concept of identity as a
homogenous essence, usually given a biological grounding in an ethnicity or race and
seen as manifested in a particular language and culture.
11
Collapsing the hierarchy between “original” and “translation” exposes how “other” cultures are
equally engaged in the contradictions inherent in representing a political figure, and troubles an
essentializing representation of women in the Arab world. Furthermore, an intertextual and
transhistorical analysis of the Sha’rawi translations – in English and in Arabic -- reveals the
range of political activism that Arab women have been participating in and narrating.
*
As one of the leading women figures of the 1919 Revolution, which, some scholars have
argued, served as a starting point for the feminist consciousness in Egypt,
12
Huda Sha’rawi was
instrumental in changing the image of Egyptian women both domestically and internationally.
Before her political activism, and largely attributable to her elite social milieu, she participated in
literary salons with Haram Rushdi Basha.
13
She organized the Union of Educated Egyptian
Women in 1914 and was elected president of the Wafdist Women’s Central Committee,
established in the nascent years of Egypt’s national consciousness. Sha’rawi also founded the
publications of two journals: L’Egyptienne in 1925 and al-misriyya in 1937. In addition, she was
the founder of the Egyptian Feminist Union (EFU), and served as its president from 1923 until
her death in 1947. As a spokesperson for the EFU, she traveled abroad and spoke on behalf of
“the Egyptian woman” (el maraa al masriya).
11
Lawrence Venuti, “Local Contingencies: translation and national identities”, Nation, Language, and the Ethics of
Translation, ed. Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood, ( New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2005).
12
Beth Baron The Woman’s Awakening in Egypt: Culture, Society and the Press (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1994). Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke’s anthology Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab
Feminist Writing (London: Virago Press, 1990).
13
Haram Rushdi Basha is referred to as Eugenie Le Brun in the English translation but as Haram Rushdi Basha in
the Arabic version.
41
Because of the cronyism of the publishing market, the lack of state funding, censorship
laws, as well as the current low literacy rates in Egypt in particular and in the Middle East in
general, Sha’rawi’s memoir circulates and is alive in English translation only.
14
Indeed, it is to
Badran’s credit that Sha’rawi has come to be known to English readers. In 1987, Harem Years,
the only translation that exists, was published in English. It continues to circulate, and is widely
read in courses on Third World Feminism, and Arab women’s literature. A quick survey of
scholarship on Sha’rawi reveals that the English version, not the Arabic version of the text,
serves as the primary source.
15
Despite the necessity of exploring the differences in the two
versions, which is the concern of this chapter, how both these memoirs came to life highlight the
futility of seeking an original text or unearthing Sha’rawi’s “true” intensions, since she dictated
her memoirs to her secretary, and died before they were completed. This incomplete, already
mediated text generated Badran’s translation and reading.
On Genre: Harem Literature, Autobiography and Memoirs
There is no denying that, as a topic, the harem sells books. The word stems from the Arabic root
h-r-m, which, through all its derivations, conveys one or both of two interrelated meanings: first,
to be forbidden or, second, unlawful, and to declare sacred. For example, muhtaram is one who
is honored and venerated; ihtiram is the aspect that inspires respect and honor. At the same time,
the worst transgressions and forbidden acts are referred to as haram. The thief is termed harami.
Thus, when considered spatially, a harem is an exclusive sanctuary to which general access is
forbidden, and within which certain individuals and modes of behavior are deemed unlawful.
14
See Mara Naaman’s article “Disciplinary Divergences: Problematizing the Field of Arabic Literature,”
Comparative Literature Studies, 47.4 (2010): 446-71.
15
For example, Beth Baron, The Women’s Awakening in Egypt (1994), Asha, “The Intersection of the Personal and
the Political: Huda Shaarawi’s Harem Years and Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage” (2012), Mohja Kahf,
“Packaging ‘Huda’: Sha’rawi’s Memoirs in the United States Reception Environment” (2000), Nawar al-Hassan
Golley Nabila Ramdani, “Women in the 1919 Egyptian Revolution: From Feminist Awakening to Nationalist
Political Activism” (2013).
42
Historically, beginning in the eighteenth century England, any book that concerned itself with
the topic of the harem, whether it was about living in, visiting, or escaping from a harem, sold.
The field was well-established as women published and inherited a general readership whose
appetite to know more about the region was a continuation from the mid-Victorian enthusiasm
for works on the classical and modern Middle East.
16
Reina Lewis argues that the first curiosity
about harem life was fueled by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu letters from Constantine
posthumously publishing in 1763, Embassy Letters.
17
Billie Melman notes that with an explosion
in Britain of publications by women in the 1850s, harem literature was regarded by the second
half of the nineteenth century as a “female area of cultural production”. Publications rose
steadily until they peaked in the 1890s.
18
The rising number of women travellers also led to a
change in the nature and frequency of harem visits. Once a novelty of the few, trips to harems
were, by the mid – nineteenth century, a staple of the tourist itinerary, bringing about changes in
Ottoman and Western women’s experiences of each other.
19
Books like Melek Hanim’s two
volume set Thirty Years in the Harem: or the Autobiography of Melek Hanim, Wife of H.H.
Kibrizli-Mehemet Pasha and Six Years in Europe: Sequel to Thirty Years in the Harem and
Emily Said Ruete’s Memoirs of an Arabian Princess from Zanzibar were written in English and
in French and appeared also translated into other European languages. The themes of these texts
delighted in exposing the intricacies of an exotic and mysteries inner feminine space.
In The English Governess in Egypt: Harem Life in Egypt and Constantinople, Emmeline
Lott, governess in 1865 to Ibrahim Pasha, son of the Khedive Ismail, Viceroy of Egypt, provides
16
Billie Melman, Women’s Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718-1918 (Basingstoke: Macmillan,
1992).
17
Reina Lewis, Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel and the Ottoman Harem (London: I B Tauris, 2004): 13.
18
Lewis, 14.
19
Ibid.
43
detailed description of costumes, fabulous jewels, and elaborate plates that was a regular feature
of women’s harem’s accounts. Similarly, Grace Ellison’s books in the 1910s and 1920s expose
an exotic Ottoman harem life and the women there who befriended her. If western women, like
Grace Ellison, knew that “a chapter, at least, on the harem will always add to the value of the
book” even if they set out specifically to explain that the harem was not as the West imagined,
women from within segregated communities found themselves publishing accounts in a genre
that specifically relied on stereotypes to sell their work.
20
In an interesting economy of exchange,
during the late nineteenth century in Egypt, elite women of literary circles were drawing on
English periodicals written by women for women (like the Female Spectator, for example,
established in 1744) to discuss matters of family, marriage and a general interest in
domesticity.
21
Thus, the history of the publication of harem literature reveals that although the
writers’ intentions might not have been to propagate stereotypes of the harem space as apolitical
or frivolous, readers’ curiosity and investment in seeing this space as removed from the public
eye is such that these harem accounts are read in the same vein.
To this day, the appetite of a western readership curious about harem life remains. Pre-
twentieth century western travel writings about the Middle East, which helped to crystalize these
Orientalist understandings of the harem, are popular texts for analysis by scholars and in college
courses focused on cultural encounter. To cite one small example, Moroccan sociologist Fatima
Mernissi’s memoirs, Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood, published in 1994, is
often assigned in introductory courses about Arab women’s writing and continues to garner
20
Reina Lewis, “Harem Literature and Women’s Travel,” ISIM review 16 (Autumn 2005) See also Marilyn
Booth’s edited volume Harem Histories: Envisioning Places and Living Spaces, (Durham, North Carolina: Duke
University Press, 2010) for a thorough study of harem literature.
21
For more on this influence, see Beth Baron’s book The Woman’s Awakening in Egypt, specifically the chapter
“The Making of a Journal” (60).
44
literary critics’ attention.
22
There is a peculiar fecundity of the association of the harem; it
connotes the passive odalisque enclosed in a space of sexual depravity and random cruelty. The
harem and its sartorial symbol, the veil, evoke silence, incarceration and sensuality. For a
discourse like Orientalism, which relies for its power on the repetition of recognizable elements,
the veiled woman in the harem serves as its iterative element.
Margot Badran’s translation of Sha’rawi’s memoirs domesticates Sha’rawi’s memoirs
into the demands of this powerful genre. The process of domestication rests on a series of
alteration that distance Sha’rawi from her political life. For one, the title, Harem Years: The
Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist, 1879-1924, on the one hand, limits the scope – temporally and
physically – of the project articulated in the Arabic version. That is, temporally, the English
translation concerns itself with a short period of Sha’rawi’s life -- her childhood years, which are
presented in the first person, and the political events, presented in the third person, that unfold
subsequent to the 1919 Revolution. This period is representative of the time prior to Sha’rawi’s
major contributions to the feminist struggle particularly, and Egypt’s visibility on the global
scale, more generally. Also, there is a further limitation by referring to her only as an “Egyptian
Feminist.” The general description, without the mention of Sha’rawi’s name, evacuates her from
her own memoirs. This is significant when considered next to the Arabic version. The title –
Hoda Sha’rawi’s Memoirs: Leader of the Modern Arab Woman ( ةأﺮﻤﻟا ةدءار يواﺮﻌﺷ يﺪھ تاﺮﻛﺬﻣ
ﺔﯿﺑﺮﻌﻟا /mudahkirat hoda sha’rawi: ra’idat al-mara’ al-‘arabiyya) – not only foregrounds her
name (the size of the font of Sha’rawi’s name is much bigger compared to the rest of the title)
but a marked difference in this title is that it widens the scope of Sha’rawi’s influence from not
just Egyptian women but to the “Arab woman.” Although this indeed risks eclipsing the
heterogeneity of Arab women, I read this as an attempt to form a pan-Arabism that was
45
emblematic of the struggle against colonialism. Furthermore, the adjective “modern”
23
serves the
opposite function to “harem.” While “modern” catapults the Arab woman into the 20
th
century,
“harem” insists on an older era.
This conflation of genres -- placing Sha’rawi’s text into the genre of harem literature --
has constricted the representation of Sha’rawi’s text. In the literary scholarship concerning the
English translation, the generic terms “autobiography” and “memoir” have been deployed
interchangeably to describe it. However, it is important that we understand the distinction, for, I
would argue, Sha’rawi intended her text to be read as a memoir, not as an autobiography. Gillian
Whitlock defines memoir as a way of “personalizing history and historicizing the personal,
placing the self in relation to public history and culture.”
24
Helen Buss’s definition of memoir
distinguishes it from autobiography on the grounds that memoir writers seek to make themselves
part of public history, focusing on the times in which they lived. Sidonie Smith and Julie Watson
articulate the key distinction between the two genres in their guide to autobiography theory and
criticism Reading Autobiography -- a memoir deals with an exteriority of the subject, whereas
the autobiography deals with interiority.
25
In exposing the historical moment in which she was a
key participant, Sha’rawi is faithful to the memoir’s generic demands. However, the translation
decisions informing the English version -- mainly the focus on her “harem years” as the subject
of the main text, while relegating the details of her political participation to the text’s epilogue --
easily lend themselves to being read as an autobiography. In Arabic literary studies, the terms
“memoir” and “autobiography” have been generally used interchangeably. Furthermore, there is
23
As mentioned in the introduction of this dissertation, Qasim Amin was very much one of Sha’rawi’s interlocutor.
24
Gillian Whitlock, Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007) 20.
25
For a thorough overview of the differences between the two in the English language see Julie Rak, “Are Memoirs
Autobiography? A Consideration of Genre and Public Identity,” Genre, 37 (2004) 3-4.
46
a gendered component, for autobiography has been a genre dominated by man, in both Arabic
and in English. The best known Arab literary critics of autobiography -- Muhammad Abdul
Ghani Hassan, Ihsan Abbas, and Yahiya Ibrahim Abdul Dayem – offer a historical understanding
of men’s autobiographical writing.
26
The Memoirs of Huda Sha’rawi: the public language of Nationalism
The Arabic memoir narrates a unique moment in Egypt’s history. Mudhakkirat Huda
Sha’rawi is a four hundred and fifty seven page document divided into forty-five chapters.
Although dictated by Sha’rawi to her secretary, it should not be regarded as a “rediscovered”
authentic voice, but rather it is also a translation that itself reduces representations of Arab
women to an elite class that speaks a Modern Standard Arabic. Sha’rawi’s Arabic text, in
opposition to the English version, is heavily invested in an exteriority. This appears most notably
in her ventriloquizing of the Egyptian newspapers widely circulating during the first two decades
of the past century to eschew a psychological interiority and focus on a civic voice. After the
initial short chapters detailing her childhood (these too are devoid of affect and interiority), the
voice of the newspaper dominates the memoir. Most of the articles she transcribes are from
prominent press widely read at the time. Chief among them were the famous kawkab al-sharq,
“Star of the East,” a paper expressing Wafd positions in the 1920s which lasted until World War
II; garidat al-mukatam, which, in its often favorable appraisal of British occupation, was
considered controversial and often attacked by nationalist papers; al-akhbar “the News,” was the
organ of the Nationalist Party, popular at the height of the nationalist movement; al-
siasa,“Politics”, which appeared in October 1922, and was the organ of the Liberal
26
Marvin Zonis’s “Autobiography and Biography,” Middle Eastern Lives: the Practice of Biography and Self-
Narrative, ed. Martin Karmer (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1991) accounts for the paucity of
autobiography and biography in the Middle East by explaining “that concepts of the individual and individualism
assume different dimensions in the Middle Eastern and in Western cultures (62).”
47
Constitutionalist Party; al-siasa was edited by Muhammad Husayn Haykal who later became
minister of education, and a prolific, acclaimed Egyptian writer.
27
On several occasions,
Sha’rawi merely generally states that this “article appeared in the press.”
Sha’rawi confers authority on her narrative in her heavy reliance on the press to form her
memoirs since the rise of the press in Egypt was enmeshed with the rise of nationalist political
activism. Historian of the Modern Middle East Ami Ayalon argues that the Arab press created a
climate for political action “by aggressively projecting political messages to its readers and
generating active political debate among an expanding reading public.”
28
Ultimately, this
undermined British occupation, whose leaders were unaware of the potential power of the press.
Ironically, Lord Dufferin – the special British envoy sent to Egypt after the conquest --
emphasized that “a free press” would be “necessary to render vital and effective” the functioning
of other institutions that he proposed. Lord Cromer who was the agent and consul-general in
Egypt from 1883 to 1907, believed in freedom of expression as “an instrumental safety valve for
releasing pressure.”
29
Through heavy reliance on the press, Sha’rawi’s Arabic text sets to print oral and
transitory accounts of her civic participation. For example, she transcribes a lecture she gave for
the Sixth International Feminist Conference in Gratz, Switzerland, which elaborates on the
closure of all houses of prostitution “in all of the countries of the world, full absolute closure.”
30
After the transcription of her speech in full, she confirms that
27
Ami Ayalon, The Press in the Arab Middle East: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) 76 -- 77.
28
Ibid., 59.
29
Ibid., 52.
Indeed, Ali Yusuf, editor of al-Mu’ayyad (“the strengthened, or victorious”) wrote that the Egyptians were resisting
the English colonial occupation through “the press, the only weapon that the occupier has left in the hands of the
nationalist to repel that which is objectionable (quoted in Ayalon 58).”
48
al-akhbar newspaper published this speech in its entirety on September 25
th
1934, and
the newspaper commented, “This speech was interrupted several times by loud
applause.” The Association of Egyptian Students of Paris sent a telegraph thanking me
for my efforts in benefiting the nation.
31
Here, the applause meeting her speech, a cross-culturally recognized marker of approval and
praise, travels across time and language. It marks her large international audience and solidifies
her popularity. Most importantly, it authenticates her public presence. In addition, the telegraph
traveling from Europe to Egypt further marks her political acuity and her fame. Collectively –
the newspaper, the applause, the telegraphy -- figure to replace her voice, and her first person
narrative. This decentering of the authorial voice through the almost exclusive reliance on public
newspapers accord with the demands of the memoir while largely eclipse her own personal
reflections.
In his seminal work, Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson famously argues that
print-languages laid the bases for national consciousness in three distinct ways:
First and foremost, they created unified fields of exchange and communication below
Latin and above the spoken vernaculars. Speakers of the huge variety of Frenches,
Englishes, or Spanishes, who might find it difficult or even impossible to understand one
another in conversation, became capable of comprehending one another via print and
paper. In the process, they gradually became aware of the hundreds of thousands, even
millions, of people in their particular language field, and at the same time that only those
hundreds of thousands, or millions, so belonged. These fellow readers, to whom they
were connected through print, formed, in their secular, particular, visible invisibility, the
embryos of the nationally imagined communities.
32
Anderson’s theories help illuminate Sha’rawi’s type of nationalism, albeit only partially. That is,
her deployment of the newspaper and her writing in a standard language indeed link her to
“hundreds of thousands, or millions, so belonged” men. Anderson reminds us that this is also an
30
Sha’rawi 305.
31
Ibid., 309.
32
Emphasis in the original
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, (New York: Verso Press) 44.
49
exclusionary practice, since it does not include women, since Egyptian women’s literacy rates
were far lower than men’s. The heavy, particularly singular reliance on the voice of the press to
narrate Egyptian women’s political participation positions Sha’rawi not only in a public forum in
Egypt and across the region, but a heretofore male one as well. The newspapers of one country
were routinely read by audiences elsewhere, and were often composed with the readership
abroad in mind. Newspapers from Egypt were in demand among the educated populations
everywhere in the Arab world, who read Egyptian dailies and literary magazines extensively.
According to an assessment in 1936, about 10,000 copies of Egyptian daily newspapers and
some 15,000 copies of other periodicals were forwarded weekly to the Fertile Crescent countries
(modern day Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel) and at times were as popular there as the
local press.
33
Yet, given the predominantly male readership of the newspapers, Sha’rawi’s civic
presence rests on her adoption of a masculinist voice. The censuses conducted at the time reveal
very low literary rates for men and women in the last decade of the 19
th
century and first decade
of the 20
th
century. According to the 1897 census, eight percent of Egyptian men and 0.2 of
Egyptian women were literate. In the next ten years Egyptian female literacy jumped 50 percent.
By 1917, the figures for women had climbed again.
34
Beth Baron attributes the very low literacy
rates for men and women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to the difference
between colloquial and literary Arabic. Fusha is severely limited in expressing everyday
conversational discourse. This reality is expressed by the linguist T.F. Mitchell:
33
Ayalon 74 – 75.
34
Baron 81-82.
Beth Baron warns, however, that these censuses were not the most reliable, since they were supervised by different
directors and “did not have uniform definitions and variable” (82). However, even though women’s literacy was on
the rise, reading, especially of political material, remained largely a male-dominated activity.
50
MSA is not a spoke language; it is nobody’s mother-tongue, and the man who wants to
talk at all times like a book or a newspaper is a decided oddity. Many perhaps most of the
purposes of speech, including notably the familial, homely and casual, are reserved for
the people of a particular Arab country by their own regional vernacular or “colloquial”
Arabic and, in the important case of Egypt, the colloquial usage of the cultured classes of
the capital city provides spoken norms for the whole country.
35
Because of its lack of use in everyday normal conversation, fusha alone is incapable of
accurately conveying the ordinary nuance and color of daily Egyptian interactions. Ironically,
thus, in inserting and guaranteeing Egyptian women’s presence in history, Sha’rawi borrows the
very language of the male nationalists.
The undoubtedly self-conscious decision to use the newspaper as an intertext, and to
present herself as a public figure is brought to light in moments of fissures, where Sha’rawi
references personal notes that she calls upon, mainly when recounting her reaction to the deaths
of loved ones in her life. Evidence of another memoir – which she refers to as her “personal
notebook”
36
-- first appears on the occasion of her detailing the painful death of her beloved
young niece Huda: “I remember that I wrote in my notebook on Monday May 11
th
1914, ‘This
morning, death had plucked our budding young flower at the peak of her youth. Alas, we
grieve.’
37
In the following chapter, she chronicles her first trip to Paris without her mother, where
she was seeking medical help for her children. The divisions in this chapter are markedly
different from the composition of the rest of text. They are fragmented, and under the day of the
week and the month, there is a brief description of daily personal events – the heavy rain that
saddens her, the travel of Ali Sha’rawi, her daughter’s eleventh birthday, her having coffee with
35
T.F. Mitchell, “Some Preliminary Observations on the Arabic Koine,” Bulletin of the British Society for Middle
Eastern Studies 2(2) (1975): 70.
36
Sha’rawi 133
37
Ibid.
51
Mademoiselle Clement. She also exposes a mixture of fragility, adoration, anxiety in regards to
her sickly daughter, Bouthna. She shares,
One look at my Bouthna makes me forget everything that has passed.
Friday, 19 June: Today Bouthna turned eleven. I thank god that he has kept me alive for
this day. I wonder if I will live to see her turn twenty? I hope my health will make that
possible.
Saturday, June 21: Today is heavy with rain and cloud. A day that is frowning and sad,
like my heart, from the morning till evening, the sun did not give him mercy with a smile
and his eyes do not tire from tears.
38
This is the only time in the narrative that marks an interiority, a fragility, a privacy, and
an emotion in these few pages of transcription from her own personal memoirs that is absent
throughout the remainder of the text. These accounts of textual fissures reveal Sha’rawi’s careful
and calculated investment in presenting an impersonal side of herself. This strategic arranging of
documents, coupled with her focus on an exterior voice articulated in Modern Standard Arabic
resists her placement as a “native voice.”
On Language
Huda Sha’rawi inhabited a world of masculine nationalism and it is in its language that she raises
a woman’s voice against the humiliation of Egypt’s colonial past. During the time in which the
memoir was set, language was used to advance a nationalist as well a pan-Arab identity. As
nationalism began to emerge in the Arab world at the turn of the last century, it was invariably
linked with the Arabic language. One of the consequences of the nahda writers “translat[ing]
and appropriate[ing] forms in European literatures to express their own identity” was that
Egyptian literature came to be associated with a single language, Arabic. This was a marked shift
from the polyglot nature of colonial Egypt’s colonial, where the elite spoke French and read
literature in French. Turkish was a compulsory subject taught in the new state schools. Women
38
Ibid, 135.
52
of letters, like A’isha Taymur, for example, left behind a body of work composed in Arabic,
Turkish and Persian.
39
Sha’rawi’s choice in writing in Modern Standard Arabic, with no traces of Egyptian
colloquialism (even in her transcriptions of conversations that took place with members of the
EFU or members of the nationalist party) accedes to nationalism’s demands of homogeneity. The
Arabic language’s relationship to the nationalist movement was heavily contested and the subject
of controversy among the Egyptian male literati. Director of Cairo University and fierce
opponent of pan-Arabism, Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid called Arabic “the Egyptian language”.
40
Conversely, Taha Hussayn, considered one of the most influential Egyptian intellectuals,
understood Arabic as Egypt’s national language but did not see the language as constituting a
Pan-Arab identity. On the other extreme, in 1929, Tawfiq ‘Awwan saw differences in the
colloquialisms as not a firm basis for a shared identity.
41
I see Sha’rawi’s choice in writing in Modern Standard Arabic as participating in these
debates and as a vehicle through which to further situate her text within the male public sphere.
The memoir is composed entirely in Modern Standard Arabic, which eclipses the heterogeneity
of spoken languages at the historical moment she narrates, as well as the existence of a
colloquialism – the spoken Arabic of the non-elite and the non-literate at the time. Sha’rawi’s
father only spoke Arabic; her mother spoke Circassian and Turkish. By virtue of her class,
Sha’rawi spoke French in her everyday life in her social circle. She spoke Arabic at women’s
39
Jacquemond 11.
40
Al-Sayyid, A. L. (1945) Al-Muntakhabat. Cairo: Matba’at al-Anglu al-Misriyya, Volume 1. (1945:247)
41
(Gershoni et al., 1986:220 Gershoni, I. and Jankowski, J. (1986) Egypt, Islam and the Arabic: the Search for
Egyptian Nationalism 1900 – 1930. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. See also Yasir
Suleiman, Arabic in the Fray: Language Ideology and Cultural Politics (2013).
53
nationalist meetings at her house and Turkish with her mother and Arabic with her father.
42
Thus, Sha’rawi’s composing her memoirs in Modern Standard Arabic necessarily entails various
exclusions, not only in drawing distinctions between the nation and its foreign others, but in
privileging certain cultural forms, practices, and constituencies within the supposedly unified
nation. The Arabic version eclipses both the colloquial element of Arabic, as well as the polyglot
nature of Sha’rawi’s social milieu.
The polyglot nature of Egypt’s citizenry at the time, the low education levels and the
varying degree of Arabic language skills of the elite ladies who participated in the 1919
Revolution is brought to light in a pivotal scene that Sha’rawi recounts. Under the section titled
“The First Woman’s Demonstration” she details that on the morning of March 20
th
, 1919, “I sent
posters that I prepared for the demonstration to Ahmed Bei Abu Asba’’s house.” Crafted with
white paint on black canvas, written in English and in French, the posters read, “Down with the
oppressor and down with colonialism.”
43
She then explains her surprise at finding one of the
posters that read, “Long live the advocates of justice and freedom” missing. She elaborates,
I asked my friend, Wagida Hanem, … the reason. She told me that one of the ladies
claimed that there was a language mistake on it, and she did not allow for it to appear.
She announced with her loudest voice among the ladies, “If knowledge of a language is
lacking, then it is best not to write in it.” But she was, in reality, the one who did not
know. I convinced her of her mistake after this, and she never forgave me for it.
44
42
Badran 22.
Baron recounts an anecdote by Labiba Hashim, the publisher of the famed woman’s magazine Fatat al-Sharq, as
well as the first Arab woman to hold the position of lecturer at the Egyptian University. She highlights the dangers
of Arabic illiteracy through the story of a young woman who applied carbolic acid to her hand thinking it was
cologne. When asked why she had not read the label, she blamed it on her having studied French, not Arabic (84-
85). Similarly, the American traveler Elizabeth Cooper observed women reading Browning and Tennyson and
conversed with women fluent in French and English (345).
43
Sha’rawi 188.
44
Ibid.
54
Here, language choice and mastery is a rich vantage point from which to articulate
nationalism and political solidarity. It not only showcases the polyglot nature of the elite
protestors but Sha’rawi’s position within the movement. Given that this is considered the first
women’s demonstration to have taken place, this affirms that language played a key role affirms
its central position in unifying the nation and articulating solidarity against British occupation. In
a way, Sha’rawi articulates that women’s participation in the political sphere, their emergence on
the historical and national stage cannot begin without the affirmation of their mastery of Arabic.
She asserts a homogenous language, culture, or identity where none was shared by the diverse
linguistic and classed population that constituted the nation.
The Politics of Sha’rawi’s Domestic Life
In Sha’rawi’s text, domesticity operates on different registers – linguistic, as well as
textual. Analysis of scenes of domesticity further articulate Sha’rawi’s national belonging. She
begins her second chapter with the following:
From the onset, I want to assert an important truth, and that is, in this memoir, I am not
trying to prove my father, Muhammad Sultan Basha’s, nationalism because, that, in my
opinion, is a self-evident issue that does not need to be doubted. And if I had known that
this was an issue that raised doubt, then I would have chosen a long time ago to meet all
of those who knew my father and who he knew and to search in their papers and dig in
their memories.
45
During the series of events surrounding the 1919 revolution led by the Egyptian army officer,
Ahmad ‘Urabi, in 1881 and 1882, Sultan Pasha at first supported ‘Urabi and his followers who
sought greater access for Egyptians to the higher ranks of the army, until then mainly the
preserve of the Turco-Circassian. This was part of the incentive to increase the participation of
Egyptians in running their country. However, Sultan Pasha became disenchanted with Urabi and
45
Ibid 21.
55
withdrew his backing. The ‘Urabi Revolution failed and the British occupied Egypt. Some
accused Sultan Pasha of facilitating the British arrival when he decided to support the khedive.
There is an interesting, purposeful paradox in Sha’rawi’s treatment of her father’s
accusation of betrayal. On the one hand, she gives credence to the weight of the issue of clearing
her father’s nationalism by beginning with “on the onset” and by dedicating the entirety of the
second chapter (of the mere fourteen solely dedicated to her private life out of a total of forty five
chapters) to detailing the intricacies of the series of events that lead to the ‘Urabi Revolt.
On the other hand, by asserting that there was no doubt of his nationalism and then
proceeding to legitimate the timing of dealing with the claims years later belittles anyone who
ever doubted her father’s loyalty. Furthermore, detailing how, in the unlikelihood that his
nationalism is questioned, she would substantiate her defense of him by evidence from his
compatriots and their notes thwarts potential accusations of this being merely her own personal
recounting. Her wording leaves no room for doubt. She affirms later in the chapter, “My father
thought the ‘Urabi Revolt was the conscience of the nation and the voice of the people”
46
.
Her hypothetical reliance on her father’s male compatriots’ accounts of the political
events, instead of on merely relying on her memory or anecdotes, reveals a paradox. On the one
hand, relying on her father’s compatriots to provide a first person account in order to authenticate
her claims showcases her investment in inserting herself in Egypt’s historical record, rather than
just a personal recounting of her childhood. The precarity of writing history is at the forefront of
her memoir. She writes, “It has been proven that the intention of some for distorting history was
in their own best interest.”
47
This is in reference to ‘Urabi’s son who, seeking her financial
backing for publication of his own father’s history, agrees to eliminate some of the slander
46
Ibid 31.
47
Ibid 22.
56
directed at her father. She then, in keeping with her efforts to present a standardized national
history, in keeping with Anderson’s theories discussed above, transcribes an article that was
published in al-ahram newspaper on September 22, 1920, in which Abd El Sami’ Urabi,
‘Urabi’s son, recounts his father’s heading the revolt. She also details an exchange with Abd El-
Aziz Afandi ‘Urabi, who sends her the first copy of the first part of the history of ‘Urabi Pasha.
In introducing the ‘Urabi Movement, he details the ‘Urabi Movement in which “Sultan Pasha –
who is living in the heavens—was an eminent participant.”
48
Sha’rawi clears the name of her father and, through her documenting of the exchange
with the ‘Urabi descendants, sheds light on the potential fabrication of any historical recounting.
I read Sha’rawi’s beginning in such a manner as a means of validating her own nationalism and
devotion to Egypt, and firmly inserting herself in a patrilineal lineage that is politically active
and is invested and loyal to Egypt.
49
Duty and Nurturing the Nation
Sha’rawi’s memoir is not only reliant on her eclipsing of a private voice but also on her
excluding identifications with her Turko-Circassian ancestory. I read this as a link to her decision
later in her career – when she is seen as a prominent figure of the Egyptian feminist movement
— to name her journals L’Egyptienne in 1925 and al-misriyya in 1937, excluding identification
with the Turko-Circassian elite of Egypt and of her mother’s lineage, and appealing specifically
to women of Egyptian background. In an atmosphere of highly charged nationalist discourse that
emphasizes the dichotomy between Egyptian and foreigner, these titles implied a rejection of the
view that her vision of society and women’s position within it was “foreign.” In other words,
48
Ibid 24.
49
It is interesting that she writes, “If my father had lived a few more years, he would have been able to lift the veil
on a lot of the secrets “(24). The veil, which figures so prominently in how Sha’rawi is remembered in the western
imaginary, is here deployed for political motivations.
57
with the title L’Egyptienne and al-misrriya, Sha’rawi asserts her own Egyptian identity. Her
nationalism, thus, is predicated on a silencing of the Turkish, or the foreign.
Obfuscation of her foreignness is best highlighted in the descriptions of her mother,
Iqbal. When she describes Iqbal’s feeding the poor in the time of the religious feasts, Sha’rawi
writes, “My mother – may God have mercy on her – holding on to traditions… leaned towards
good and charity, and for that reason, there was always a share for the poor during all our holiday
celebrations.”
50
She continues by detailing how, on the Muslim holidays, the poor would stand in
line outside of the Sha’rawi home – their memory of the distribution of food in previous years
their only invitation. Sha’rawi chronicles how her mother would herself participate in passing out
the food – a noteworthy gesture since the lady of the house had no reason to aid in this activity.
Sha’rawi and her brother would also participate in this distribution. During the time of the feast,
the doors would open; people would eat until they were satiated and then each one would take
food enough for his wife, children and for the rest of the members of his household. Sha’rawi
recounts how the sight would “pain us and have an effect on us.”
51
She adds, “if we saw among
the beggars a blind man, a cripple, a sick person an old person ... we would ask our mother to
command, to give orders to give those who elicited our emotions because of his bad
condition…”
52
She then cites how some of the visitors would return to participate in this ritual
for up to forty more years.
This recounting is significant in two ways. At the end of her descriptions of the different
holidays, she places this charity work in a national context, elaborating,
50
Sha’rawi 52.
51
Ibid. 53.
52
Ibid.
58
Each one of these holidays showcased our holding on to the fantastic Egyptian
nationalism that, sadly, is dwindling and decaying because of foreign traditions in our
country and the new generation’s leanings to the celebration of the foreign traditions.
53
Here, she establishes her mother as honoring a long-held tradition that is being threatened by
foreign influence. The irony is, however, that her mother was not of Egyptian descent.
Sha’rawi’s Circassian maternal grandfather was captured by the Czarist Russia in the 1860s.
However, rumor circulated that he had betrayed his country and joined the Russians. After her
grandfather’s death by the Russians, her grandmother took her children (Sha’rawi’s mother,
Iqbal, among them) to Istanbul. Due to the harsh refugee conditions, the death of one of her
children and mistreatment of the family as a whole, Sha’rawi’s Circassian grandmother decided
to send Iqbal to Egypt, under the care of a relative called Yusif Pasha Sabri. When they arrived
in Egypt, Yusif Pasha Sabri was away and his wife refused to accept Iqbal. Iqbal then went to
Raghib Bey’s house, in which she met Sha’rawi’s father, Muhammad Sultan Basha, who, in an
attempt to alleviate Iqbal’s distress, traced the rest of the brothers in Turkey and brought them all
to Egypt.
Sha’rawi’s lamenting of the dwindling of Egyptian traditions is ironic here, since her
insistence on her mother’s Egyptian nationalism is at the expense of obfuscating her Turco-
Circassian roots. Nevertheless, she blurs the distinction between the political and the domestic
space by affirming domestic acts like care taking, cooking and sharing a meal as national and
political gesture. Historian Lisa Pollard contends, “acts such as hospitality and charity –
‘nurturing the nation’ – were potent political symbols throughout the turbulent years of 1919-22.
Caring for the nation as a family had become the sine qua non of modern Egyptian politics by
53
Ibid. 55.
59
1919. A preoccupation with charity during the 1919 Revolution was symbolic of political
acumen, not apathy.”
54
Harem Years: on Introductions
The English translation of the memoir, however, relies on a binaristic understanding of
Sha’rawi’s domestic and political life. Mudhakkirat Huda Sha’rawi’s transformation for a
transnational English readership rests on a re-historicization, an invested fragmentation, severe
deletion and conspicuous augmentation. Attention to this re-ordering is necessary given
Badran’s assertion to the faithfulness of the translation,
55
assuring the reader that she hopes that
“the English version of the memoirs will echo, as much as possible, “Huda’s own voice.”
56
At
the same time, she admits in the preface that
Some reordering of the text was dictated by chronology and by the concern to preserve
the natural flow of the narrative. There were also some minor deletions to remove
repetitions or the occasional overelaboration. Another kind of intervention was the
removal to an Appendix of material Huda introduced to refute charges of her father’s
complicity in the entry of the British into Egypt in 1882. This, however important for her
to put on record and for the interested historian, does not form part of the central
narrative of her own reminiscences… Everything unless otherwise indicated is from
Huda’s memoirs.
57
Badran’s claim of preserving a “natural flow of the narrative” and her decision concerning what
constitutes the “central narrative of her own reminiscences” betrays a disavowal of the text’s
dynamism, and the pressures of a reception audience informed by a “horizon of expectation”.
54
Lisa Pollard, “Introduction,” in Nurturing the Nation: The Family Politics of Modernizing, Colonizing, and
Liberating Egypt, 1805-1923. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 2.
55
I choose the word “faithful” deliberately here, knowing the gendered connotation that it invokes. Here I am
referring to Lori Chamerlain “Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation,” The Translation Studies Reader, ed.
Lawrence Venuti (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2004).
56
Badran 2.
57
Badran 3.
60
The details of Badran’s access to the Arabic memoirs may account for some of the
reasons for the differences between the English and the Arabic. In the Preface to Harem Years,
Badran explains her relationship with Hawa Idris, “a younger cousin of Huda Sha’rawi and
confidante in later year” who Sha’rawi “entrusted … to oversee the publishing of the memoir if
she died before her task was complete.”
58
Badran’s relationship with Idris possibly accounts for
the decision taken in regards to the “interventions” Badran made in the Arabic text. It is possible
that Badran was working from a text Idris provided that differed from the copy that was
published in Arabic. However, the faithful translations of sections from the published Arabic
version that appear in Harem Years suggest that at least sections of Idris’s copy were very
similar to the one that is presently available in the Arabic.
59
Differences in how Sha’rawi is introduced in the Arabic text as compared to the English
are also emblematic of the perhaps inadvertent effects of reducing the scope of her influence in
the process of domesticating her into a hegemonic language and readership. The first adjective
Amina El-Said, the author of the introduction, used to describe Sha’rawi is as “the immortal
leader” (ةﺪﻟﺎﺨﻟا ﺔﻤﯿﻋﺰﻟا /al-zaima al khalida) who, she asserts, was “no doubt the commander of the
women’s liberation movement in the entire Muslim world.”
60
These two descriptions place
Sha’rawi not only in a leadership position outside of the physical confines of her domestic space,
but also outside of Egypt, as a leader of women across the Muslim world.
61
Furthermore, the
58
Badran 1.
59
In my textual reading of Harem Years, I conjecture that Badran had access to other materials in addition to the
printed Arabic memoir that is available. This can be substantiated by her giving thanks to Saiza Nabarawi “for
sharing stories of her trying adolescent in the Cairo harem world into which she was thrust after a Paris childhood,
of the unveiling and feminist movement days with Huda”(4). Indeed, I see markings of the “escapee” and “victim”
categories that Kahf offers, in words like “trying” and the violent connotations of the word “thrust.”
60
Sha’rawi 7.
61
This adds an exclusive religious element to her description incongruent with Sha’rawi’s descriptions of solidarity
implicit in her text. In the struggle against the English soldiers, as well as in her feminist struggles, Sha’rawi
61
article “the” signifies a grandeur, a fame, a universality. The second paragraph of the
introduction then details how Sha’rawi
spent no less than fifty years of her life in a bitter battle on behalf of the injustice of the
Muslim woman in general, and the Arab women in particular. She was the first to lift the
veil, and she called for the complete equality between the two sexes in order to enable
half the Arab people from leaving their social isolation and launching them into the world
of construction and production.
62
Together, these descriptions not only lionize Sha’rawi as an exemplar Muslim woman, but also
as a leader of Arab woman in general. The last description of her launching Arab women from
the isolation of the harem life into a productive life has undoubtedly economic undertones.
Although there is mention of the veil, there is no mention of the harem directly, only “social
isolation.”
Conversely, the first descriptions of Sha’rawi in Harem Years appear in the preface and
read as follows:
Towards the end of her life, Huda Sha’rawi began to write her memoirs. The decision to
record her early, private years was, like much of Huda Sha’rawi’s life, out of the
ordinary. Private life, family life, inner feelings and thoughts were sacrosanct. They were
as veiled by convention as women’s faces had been. Writing about her life during the
harem years was a final unveiling. It can be seen as Huda Sha’rawi’s final feminist act.
63
Although this presents Sha’rawi, as does the Arabic, as exceptional, the focus here is on her
private life. Missing is any mention of her extensive influence on the women of the Arab world,
or her political activism. Moreover, while the Arabic introduction is invested in repeating her
Muslim background, and then her Arabness, the English focuses on her foreignness – her ability
to speak French and her Turco-Circassian heritage. The English introduction continues,
collaborated with Copts and Muslims, and did not distinguish between the two – she referred to herself as
representing the “the Egyptian woman,” not the Muslim woman, Coptic woman, the poor woman or the elite
woman.
62
Sha’rawi 7.
63
Badran 1.
62
As an upper-class woman, Huda Sha’rawi’s social language was French. She also knew
Turkish, the language of her mother and the Turco-Circassian elites and royal family. But
Huda had a special fondness for Arabic, her father’s tongue and the national language. In
later years, as the feminist movement broadened its base in Egypt and reached out to
neighbouring countries, Huda began to use Arabic more and more often in public,
especially in her speeches.
64
These discrepancies between texts showcase the different motivations that govern the editors and
contributors, not only based on the unique lens through which they view Sha’rawi but also,
perhaps, based on the readership they anticipate the publications will garner. Thus, Badran, as is
affirmed by the reviews, is aware of the seductive elements behind the private, harem life of a
renowned political figure, that, in translating her to a wider audience, domesticates her in her
household. Ironically, in order for her to appear on the Global North’s literary stage through
translation, she must remain within the harem. On the other hand, the Arabic introduction reveals
an investment in Sha’rawi’s wider appeal to an Arab, specifically Muslim, readership.
Mohja Kahf compellingly argues that pressures of the United States reception
environment played a factor in the following translation decisions: to minimize Sha’rawi’s
engagement with Arab men, over-exaggerate Europe’s influences on her and eclipse her
command of class privilege.
65
Drawing on Hans Robert Jauss’s work on a reading public’s
“horizon of expectations,” Kahf proposes that the United States reading environment has
necessitated the packaging of Muslim women as victims, escapee, or pawn. These frames of
representation, Kahf argues, confined Badran’s translation decisions, of no fault of her own.
64
Ibid.
65
Mohja Kahf, “Packaging ‘Huda’: Sha’rawi’s Memoirs in the United States Reception Environment,” Going
Global: the Transnational Reception of Third World Women Writers, ed Amal Amireh and Lisa Suhair Majaj (New
York: Garland, 2000) 149.
63
Because the resulting translation propagates these familiar three frames of analysis, the text is
popular among English readers.
66
The critique of the reception market as necessitating alterations to the text is apt and
valid. But I would like to underscore the consequences of these decisions and to provide another
paradigm for the analysis – mainly a historical dimension attentive to the role of domesticity’s
relationship to political participation in turn of the century Egypt. As previously argued, a
transfer of attention to Sha’rawi’s strategic deployment of domesticity as a nationalist praxis that
would prepare for the 1919 Revolution and subsequent feminist movements, albeit articulated in
a masculinist voice, via a very public medium, diversifies Sha’rawi’s image of victimhood.
A New Chronology: Shifting of Family Influence
Badran’s admitted interventions in the original to preserve the “natural flow of the
narrative” has been framed in a teleological grid that conceptualizes a history of progress
beginning in the sequestered harem and moves to national consciousness and culminating at the
train station where Sha’rawi unveils and is “liberated.” This is presented structurally. The one
hundred and fifty eight page English text is separated into an introduction and four parts; the
main section is further separated: “Part One: The Family”, “Part Two: Childhood in the Harem
1884-92”, “Part Three: A Separate Life 1892-1900”, “Part Four: A Wife in the Harem 1900-
1919”, an Epilogue, Notes, Appendix, and Glossary. Each part constituting the bulk of the text
is further partitioned into smaller sections. Sample subheadings read as follows: “Two Mothers”,
“The Wedding”, “A European Summer on the Eve of War.”
Since Badran’s translated memoir is invested in a chronological retelling of Sha’rawi’s
life, the decision of what appears first establishes the tone and is a decision from which one may
understand Badran emphasis. As previously, what begins Harem Years is a detailing of a
66
Ibid. 151.
64
heritage that is not only non-Egyptian but also maternal, rather than paternal. That is, the first
heading of part one is “Circassian Relatives”, the second “My Mother” and the third “My
Father.” The section titled “My Mother” chronicles the tale of Iqbal’s, Sha’rawi’s mother, arrival
in Egypt.
Previously in this chapter, I analyzed Sha’rawi’s presentation of her mother’s performance of
domesticity as inserting her in a nationalist heritage, while eclipsing her foreign roots. In the
English version, the decisions to evacuate the political valence of the domestic rituals performed
by Iqbal further distance the English translation from the politics of the Arabic text. The section
titled “Feasts” provides a general overview of religious rituals that take place in Egypt and the
Muslim world in general. Badran lists the different holidays –“Id al-Saghir (the Minor Feast)”,
“Id al Kabir (the Major Feast)”, “Yaum Ashura (the anniversary slaying of Husain)”
67
–
descriptions that are not found in the Arabic version. Furthermore, the display of generosity and
ministry that, I contend, Sha’rawi includes to further bolster her nationalist credibility is reduced
to “we distributed savoury pastries, fatta, and piasters to mark the lailat isra wa al-miraj (the
Night of the Ascension).”
68
The elision of the political tenor surrounding the occasion of the
feasts and the ministering to the poor distances not only Iqbal from political activism and from
valuing rituals of domesticity as integral to this activism, but also eclipses the political
consciousness that was installed in Sha’rawi as a child. Furthermore, it establishes Sha’rawi’s
legacy outside of Egypt, an insistence on foreignness that is fortified by the overemphasis on
Sha’rawi’s French schooling.
67
Badran 46.
68
Ibid.
65
As Kahf argues in regards to other sections of Harem Years, the placement of the
mother’s story at the forefront of the narrative contributes to affirming an English readers’
investment in understanding Arab women’s role as powerless victims of their circumstances and
in seeing dissonance between the sexes. In fact, women’s fight for expanded roles was not a
campaign of the battle of the sexes. In The Women’s Awakening in Egypt, Beth Baron’s history
of the first journals in Egypt pre-1919 revolution, she studies prominent journal editors and
writers such as Malak Hifini Nasif and Labiba Hashim, detailing,
Although some women writers accused Egyptian men of blocking them -- … -- such
attacks did not characterize their writings. Many educated women had received strong
support from individual men and recognized that they made better allies than enemies.
Their comments were more often rebukes of delinquent partners, who were needed to
help improve women’s situation, than salvos aimed at opponents.
69
Furthermore, decisions made in Harem Years regarding the descriptions of the role
Sha’rawi’s father played in her life and in her text uncover an investment in distancing his
influence on her. The section titled “My Father” introduces the reader to Muhammad Sultan
Basha, the Commissioner of the District of Qulusan in the province of Minya. He was first
governor of Bani Swaif, then Asyut, and finally Rudah al-Bahrain, deputy inspector of Upper
Egypt and then Inspector General. The list of his titles establishes him as a key leading figure in
Upper Egypt, often seen as the heart of Egypt. Badran then briefly introduces Muhammad
Sultan’s involvement in the ‘Urabi Revolt.
Then, she relegates the details of ‘Urabi movement to
the footnote of this section
70
and completes the narrative in the Appendix, where there is a
faithful, although abridged, translation of Sha’rawi’s investment in clearing her father’s name.
71
69
Baron 119.
70
Badran 29.
71
Ibid. 148.
66
Whereas the clearing of her father’s name appears in Sha’rawi’s second chapter in the Arabic, in
the English text, it appears in the periphery of the main text.
That the clearing of Muhammad Sultan Pasha’s name in regards to the ‘Urabi episode is
curtailed in the main body of the text and relegated and further elaborated on in the Appendix is
another instance of upsetting the chronology that Sha’rawi intended in the Arabic version.
According to the OED, an Appendix is “an addition subjoined to a document or book, having
some contributory value in connection with the subject matter of the work, but not essential to its
completeness.”
72
This reordering in Harem Years establishes a different chronology: one where
the political events that ran parallel to Sha’rawi’s coming of age were not part of the main
narrative of her life. This episode’s very placement in the Appendix severely downplays
Sha’rawi’s motivation in establishing herself as Egyptian and as a nationalist. What Badran
relegates to the periphery of the narrative is central and at the forefront to Sha’rawi’s project.
Placing this in the periphery and the apoliticized harem life in the middle contributes to the
marginalization of Sha’rawi political influence.
Harem Year’s Appendix is a faithful, abridged, translation of the second chapter of
Mudhakkirat Huda Sha’rawi. Badran uses the first person which leads the English reader to
believe that the “I” in the Appendix is the same “I” that begin the main chapters of the narrative.
Given the inflated value of the first person that structures a reading public’s understanding of an
unfamiliar region, eclipsing the differences between the “I” in the main sections of the
translation and the “I” in the Appendix reveals the compromised position Sha’rawi’s original
memoirs finds itself in as it navigates the dominant cultural codes of the reception market.
73
72
emphasis mine
73
In his discussion of online lives, John Zuern proposes, “As many critics have pointed out, the ‘I” of
autobiography and memoir, and even the ‘third-person’ subject of biography, has never been anything but virtual –
67
Here, Spivak’s argument in “The Politics of Translation” is helpful. Spivak notes that translation
calls on the translator to abandon authorial autonomy for surrogacy, to “work at someone else’s
title,” to “surrender to the text”
74
that she or he translates. Spivak, however, does not connect the
seductions of translation to the operations of cultural imperials. To be fair, her essay concerns
itself with the translation of a native Bengali tongue whose intimacy has been lost to her as an
Indian-born academic living in the postcolonial diaspora, not of the transfers of power at stake
when a postcolonial subject translates a colonizer’s language – or vice versa. When Spivak does
address the geopolitics of translation, it is to condemn the “First World” feminist translator who
approaches the “Third World” woman’s text as a native informant, blind to the text’s rhetoricity
– the texture of its language and its literary context – and attentive only to the anthropological
information that it can deliver about the presumed plight of the nonwhite female subject. This is
why she valorizes a foreignizing praxis of translation in which the translator surrenders to the
(presumably) alien signifiers of the original and channels their manners of meaning. Still,
Spivak’s suggestion that translation seduces the translator into surrendering self-identity to the
text that she or he translates, into “miming … the responsibility to the trace of the other in the
self,”
75
hints at the ways in which translation can be used to usurp the ontological and territorial
“title” of the original text. A “trace of the other in the self” there might always be, but a
translator who wields disproportionate power – by virtue of his or her existence in the dominant
language -- over the non-hegemonic language, can exploit that trace to hegemonic advantage.
an image that coalesces in the space between the welter of lived experience, and the grammars, figures, and narrative
conventions of the languages into which that experience is cast, and which it always exceed” (2003, xi).
74
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Politics of Translation,” Outside in the Teaching Machine, (New York:
Routledge, 1993) 190.
75
Spivak 179.
68
Thus, in Badran’s evocation of the “I” in her attempt to claim to “echo Huda’s tongue”,
she has “surrendered to the text” while still maintaining her position of power. Moreover,
Badran’s referring to Sha’rawi simply as “Huda” in the preface and the introduction of the
translation betrays a feeling of kinship and familiarity that stems perhaps from the time she spent
with Hawa Idris or with the text. However, I see this as eclipsing the powers bestowed on her by
virtue of the fact that Sha’rawi could not oversee the publication of her book either in Arabic or
in English. Badran’s familiarity becomes problematic when we probe how the first person
position from which she speaks is not at all the same one from which Sha’rawi would speak.
With the knowledge of Badran’s decisions regarding augmenting, cutting, and editing, the “I” in
Harem Years then becomes Badran herself imagining a Sha’rawi that did not really exist – one
that is made in the image of exoticism, presumable confined to her domestic space.
Conspicuous Augmentation: Sha’rawi as Victim
In addition to a reordering, there are instances of embellishments in the text that cast
Sha’rawi’s experiences of her domestic life – specifically her marriage -- in a light of fear and
terror. The motivations behind Sha’rawi’s union with Ali Sha’rawi were economical and
practical. In order to avoid the Khedive’s family from asking the young Sha’rawi for her hand in
marriage, Iqbal arranges the marriage with Ali Sha’rawi, Huda’s paternal cousin. The description
of the wedding ceremony reads very differently in the Arabic than in the English. In the Arabic,
the marriage scene occupies two paragraphs, is sober and unemotional. Sha’rawi recounts, matter
of factly:
When they sat me down at the marriage throne, the foreign women came, taking their
turns holding my hands and offering me bouquets of flowers or they would put them at
my feet in a sense of emotion. I didn’t understand at the time that those feelings were
because of my marriage at such an early age. To the roll of drums, the women departed
and the eunuch entered, announcing the arrival of the groom. He entered and prayed two
69
rak’ah.
76
Then he got up and came towards me, lifted the veil from my face, and kissed
me on my forehead. He then took my hand and ascended with me to the bridal throne and
took his place beside me, speaking to me about something I understood nothing of. Then,
they came, as is the custom, with goblets of red sorbet. He gave me a goblet and then
took the other.
77
Sha’rawi’s description is a factual chronicling of a short series of happenings, and is void of
disclosing any emotions on her part – only uncertainty and confusion. The emotions that are
detailed are displaced onto the women surrounding her, and even then, are sober and lack flare
and elaboration. The scene ends here; the next paragraph begins with descriptions of the
morning after her wedding night, where she gazes out to the garden and notices the missing tent
and the decorative hangings from the wedding night. She shrinks back at discovering that the
trees that she loved and nurtured, planted by her father, were also gone. She proceeds to cry and
recalls, “And I saw in this arid garden the life that I was going to live, detached from everything
that amused me and kept me company.”
78
Undoubtedly, this scene conveys the distress of the
young Sha’rawi at marrying at such a young age. However, instead of elaborating on her
personal feelings, she metaphorizes them in her description of the now arid garden. The trees
planted by her father, now gone, invite us to understand that the end of a new patriarchy is being
replaced with a new one.
In the English translation, these two paragraphs are augmented into two pages and are
infused with drama fear, and tears. Although the entire original wording remains in translation,
there are several additions. For example, just prior to the groom’s appearance, between the
eunuch announcing him and his entrance, the Arabic word describing the women as insarafat
(departed) is replaced with the English phrase “the women hastened out of the room or slipped
76
Rak’ah refers to how many standings in a prayer. Two rak’ah means one would stand up facing kibla two times.
77
Sha’rawi 76. This and all translations from the Arabic are mine.
78
Ibid.
70
behind curtains.”
79
To “hasten” and “to slip away” suggest a subservience, a sense of urgency,
and fear; “slipping away” evokes a noiselessness, and invites the image of the stereotype of Arab
women making themselves scarce in fear of male company. Together, these two verbs offer an
implied meekness. Then, more detail is added that is absent from the Arabic:
In an instant, the delicious dream vanished and stark reality appeared. Faint and crying, I
clung to the gown of a relation – the wife of Ahmad Bey Hijazi – who was trying to flee
like the others and I pleaded, ‘Don’t abandon me here! Take me with you.’ My French
tutor who was at my side embraced me and cried along with me murmuring, ‘Have
courage, my daughter, have courage.’ Mme Richard, supporting me on the other side,
wept as she tried to console me with tender words. Then a woman came and lowered a
veil of silver thread over my head like a mask concealing the face of a condemned person
approaching execution.
80
Other additions include an embellishment in the details of the prayer mat -- “on a mat of red
velvet embossed with silver”
81
-- and between the newly weds sitting on the bridal throne to Ali
Sha’rawi speaking to her is added a description of Huda, “All the while, I was trembling like a
branch in a storm.”
82
After the goblets are offered, the translation continues, “I was unable to
taste the ritual drink. Finally, my new husband took me by the hand. In my daze I knew not
where I was being led.”
83
These additions render the scene of the wedding night in a very different light from the
Arabic version. Here, Sha’rawi’s confusion about the events we find in Arabic is replaced with
deep despair, fear and, in the women of her community’s refusal to help her, painful isolation.
There is also a sense that she was not fully present, in her inability to taste the drink and “in my
79
Badran 57.
80
Ibid. This excerpt is reprinted in the edited volume Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing under
the chapter titled “Farewell, Betrothal and Wedding” (42—48).
81
Ibid.
82
Ibid.
83
Ibid.
71
daze.” Lastly, the weight of the analogy of the wedding veil being compared to a mask of a
condemned person approaching execution is so heavy that it leaves no room for subtlety. Again,
whether or not these events actually transpired are not of concern here. What concerns me is the
difference in the Arabic and the English. Given the claim that Badran makes that she hopes to
“echo, as much as possible, Huda’s voice”
84
coupled with Badran’s choice in using the first
person adds to the (mis)apprehension that this is what Sha’rawi intended.
Badran domesticates the written Arabic version of the memoirs into the widely read
English version by eclipsing Sha’rawi’s patriotic, paternal, Egyptian lineage, augmenting a sense
of solitude and dejection through an overemphasis on a cropped vision of her domestic life.
These decisions arrest Sha’rawi in history and keep her inside her home. This is further
evidenced in the images that accompany the text.
Arresting Time: The Function of the Photograph in Badran’s Harem Years
Within the text, Harem Years, forty-two images appear – none of which are present in the
Arabic memoir. Photographs operate to validate the reality of the subject matter in the text; they
are a code of ethnographic authority. The photograph by its very nature is of the past yet it is also
of the present. Roland Barthes reminds us that photographs preserve a fragment of the past that is
transported in apparent entirety to the present – the ‘there-then’ becomes the ‘here-now.’
85
The
very immediacy and realism of the photograph set it apart from all other mechanisms through
which we have access to the past. As Roland Barthes states, what the photograph reproduces to
infinity has occurred only once: “the photograph mechanically repeats what could never be
repeated existentially.”
86
The repetition of arrested time is powerful for it allows the viewer to
84
Ibid., 2.
85
Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text. Trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977) 44.
72
linger, imagine or analyze in a way which would not be possible in the natural flow of time.
Anthropologist Elizabeth Edwards argues that the photograph perpetuates the past, presenting a
timeless vision and enacts a manifestation of an atemporal discourse.
87
I read the stillness that is
the very nature of photographs (a photograph is also called a “still”) as participating in the larger
project of Badran confining Sha’rawi to the space of the harem, trying to fix only one
understanding of Sha’rawi --- that which sees her as a victim. In other words, the very
atemporality of a photograph participates in the different teleology that is part of Badran’s
project. One mode through which this is accomplished is through her access and exposure of
what are perceived as forbidden quarters.
88
In discussing ethnographers who traveled to Egypt during the turn of the last century,
historian Lisa Pollard argues that
the secrets found within the living spaces of Egypt’s ruling elite were thus used to shape
an Egyptian landscape on which the colonial experience was later played out…. An eye
for urban spatial arrangements and design was commonplace when living quarters were
assessed.
89
86
Barthes 14.
87
Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object ( New York: Columbia University
Press, 1983)
88
In “Harem/House/Set: Domestic Interiors in Photography from the Late Ottoman World”, Harem Histories:
Envisioning Places and Living Spaces, ed. Marilyn Booth (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), Nancy
Micklewright analyses photographs produced and consumed during the Ottoman Empire. She describes, “Itself a
creation of the nineteenth century, the photograph was valued above all for its truthfulness—even as consumers and
practitioners of the new art knew firsthand the constructed nature of the photographic image. Perhaps not
surprisingly given the characteristics they share, in the nineteenth century the harem and the photograph came
together as a site where complex and often competing visions of the harem could be negotiated” (239).
There is extensive literature on Orientalist painting, including harem images. For a range of approaches to this topic,
see Jill Beaulieu and Mary Roberts, Orientalism’s Interlocutors (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002); Reina
Lewis, Gendering Orientalism (Oxon: Routledge, 1996) ; John MacKenzie, Orientalism (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1995); Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient,” Art in America, 1983. Also Mallek Alloula’s Colonial
Harem (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press) and the critical response it invited.
89
Lisa Pollard, Nurturing the Nation, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005) 51.
73
The subject matter of the images in Harem Years range from photographs of Sha’rawi’s family
members, friends -- “portraits of turn of the century Egyptian ladies”
90
-- a few images of key
monuments in Cairo (the Cairo Opera House, the Continental Savoy Hotel where members of the
Wafd met the British early in the revolution, the Nasr al-Nil Bridge, the Cairo Railway Station),
and two images of houses
91
with explanations intended to educate an audience unfamiliar with
the region, the time period, or the culture. For example, the caption “the wooden lattice screens
on the protruding windows allowed women to look out without being seen. By Huda’s time, the
wealthy had started to build villas on garden plots nearer the Nile.” accompanies an image of a
building façade in turn of the last century Cairo. Another of a reception room “decorated in a
mélange of oriental and western styles, a growing practice among the wealthy from the late
century. This room is in the house of Mustafa Bey Kamil Yaghan”
92
exposes the colonial lens
through which these photographs are viewed. This image, empty of people, seems to have been
intended to document the state of the room, the furniture and various decorations that were
popular at the time the photograph was taken (interestingly, there is no date). The room is
crowded with objects. The cupboard doors are decorated with carved wood objects and other
intricate items. It’s a wide angle view, affirming the unnamed photographers’ access to the
private quarters. The furniture’s sole function seems to be decorative. This room’s image has no
overlap with the topic discussed in the text and bears no relation to Sha’rawi’s life. However, it
satisfies the imagination of readers curious about “harem life.” In evacuating Sha’rawi from the
image completely and showcasing the ornate, decadent details of Mustafa Kamil’s drawing
90
Badran 77.
91
Badran 9.
92
Badran 12.
Mustafa Kamil was a key nationalist activist, founder of the National Party in 1907, months before his death.
74
room, we are made to draw a connection between the objects of the living environment and the
people who inhabited it. In this case, the very foreignness of the objects further showcases the
foreignness of the woman discussed.
Another image similarly invites the reader to make a connection between the inanimate
material of the architecture and the condition within which people lived. The description of the
photographed door of Sha’rawi’s house in Cairo reads, “elaborately worked wood and metal
door of Huda’s house in Cairo.”
93
The combination of the wood and the metal suggest to the
reader that Sha’rawi was secluded and caged in. It is a visual representation and further
affirmation of the narrative of seclusion. Taken together, the messages that the images convey,
the disjunction between the text and the image, and their marked absence from the Arabic
memoirs, further distance Harem Years from the motivation of the Arabic memoir – that is, to
present a public, politically active figure.
The most striking photographs are those depicting Sha’rawi inside her home, displaying
her fashion choices – a range of Egyptian and Western clothing. In the section titled “Routines
and Events”, an overexposed photograph captioned “Huda reclining at home – a playful
photograph” sees her alone, extended across the front of the picture frame, arm languidly above
her head, undoubtedly relaxed. Her hair is long, exposed and falls by her shoulders. Lying on an
ornately upholstered couch, she gazes directly at the camera. In the center of the image rests a
small table, with a vase filled with a small bouquet of flowers. To the right of the relaxed
Sha’rawi is an even fainter hint of a latticed woodworked structure. There are no windows, no
doors and no sign of any other people. Exposure is an apposite term here, for it carries not only
the technical meaning, but it also serves to describe the moment exposed to the readers’ scrutiny.
93
Badran 34.
75
The weight of this is compounded by the fact that Muslim women are not to be photographed.
Edwards theorizes that
the photograph contains and constrains within its own boundaries, excluding all else. As
such it becomes a metaphor of power, having the ability to appropriate and
decontextualize time and space and those who exist within it. Through photography, the
‘type’, the abstract essence of human variation, was perceived to be an observable reality.
The inevitable detail created by the photographer becomes a symbol for the whole and
tempts the viewer to allow the specific to stand for generalities, becoming a symbol for
wider truths, at the risk of stereotyping and misrepresentation. If photography is
perceived as ‘reality’ then modes of representation will themselves enhance that ‘reality’
– in other words the photograph is perceived as ‘real’ or ‘true’ because that is what the
viewer expects to see: ‘this is how it should be’ becomes ‘ this is how it is/was.’
94
Sha’rawi languishing next to ornate objects draws on the common elements used by
commercial photographers –Pascal Sebah, the Policarpe Joaillier, and Guillaume Berggren, men
who ran successful commercial studios in Istanbul creating imaginary harems in which
foreigners can pose.
95
Nancy Micklewright’s examination of a small sample of the numerous
harem photographs that were produced in the heyday of commercial tourist photography in the
Ottoman Empire, from about 1865 to 1890, enumerates the iconic elements used to signal a
harem: a small table, a couch, and a reclining woman engaging the sexual imagination of the
viewer. The photographs’ defining elements are a lavish use of textiles of different colors,
textures and patterns to create the space, which is furnished with a low couch and cushions.
Smaller decorative elements fill out the scene. The view from the window was never included in
the harem scene, thus reinforcing both the sense of interiority of the image itself and the
confining nature of the stereotypical harem. The harem inhabitants, whose poses were carefully
94
Elizabeth Edwards, “Introduction,” Anthropology and Photography, 1860-1920 (New Haven: Yale University
Press in Association with the Royal Anthropological Institute, 1992) 3-17.
95
Nancy Micklewright’s “Harem/House/Set: Domestic Interiors in Photography from the Late Ottoman World,”
Harem Histories: Envisioning Places and Living Spaces, ed. Marilyn Booth (Durham [N.C.]: Duke University
Press, 2010) 239-260.
76
orchestrated wear a hodgepodge of garments that cannot be identified as the dress of any one
place but are obviously intended to evoke the region generally.
96
The image, the pose, the
furniture in Sha’rawi’s photo strikingly resemble the composition, subject matter and decisions
made in the harem photograph Micklewright studies. The addition of the phrase “ a playful
photograph” to caption Sha’rawi’s photo suggests a frivolity and an ease that renders her girlish.
A peculiar cluster of photographs present Sha’rawi in varying types of dress. The caption
accompanying one reads, “Huda and friend pose in Egyptian peasant dresses. Dressing up was a
favorite pastime in the harem.”
97
Here, we see two women, seated on the floor, in traditional
peasant attire – black fabric covering multiple layers of clothing, with black veils loosely draped
on their heads. Accompanying the two women are two Orientalist accouterments, evoking the
decisions made in the studios in Istanbul – a small vase that Sha’rawi loosely leans on while the
unnamed friend awkwardly holds on to a traditional ceramic water jug (usually carried on the
head by peasant women). Both women look directly at the camera, one (it is not identified
which one is Sha’rawi) smiles calmly and the other woman is expressionless. Captions, as
Barthes has argued, are often crucial in tying down photography’s polysemy.
98
This caption
locates the photograph within conventions of classed meaning. “Dressing-up” evokes a childlike
activity, and “a favorite pastime” hints that this girlish activity was repeated, propagating the
perception of harem life as a life of leisure, where its inhabitants have the time to dress up in
different clothing. In addition, describing the clothes as “Egyptian peasant dress” evacuates the
96
Micklewright.
97
Badran 47.
98
Barthes.
77
relationship of power that the elite class – a minority which Sha’rawi belongs to – enjoyed over
the peasant class.
99
Adding to the distanciation is the anonymity of the unnamed “friend” – an unidentified,
essentialized figure. This gesture is again repeated later in the text, where we find a full length
page divided into four images of portraits of unnamed women – three portraits and one very faint
image of two women reading. The caption simply reads: “Portraits of turn of the century
Egyptian ladies. Friends of Huda.” This distancing diverges from Badran’s ventriloquizing of
Sha’rawi’s voice in her unproblematized adaptation of the first person, as analyzed above.
Other images, with descriptions like “Huda wearing hat in Paris”
100
and “Huda in
yashmak and ferace – Turkish style veil and cloak”
101
position Sha’rawi in a series of cross-
cultural and cross-class dressing. Reina Lewis argues that “clothes operate as visible gatekeepers
of …. division and, even when worn against the grain, serve to re-emphasize the existence of the
dividing line.”
102
Clothes, Gail Ching-Liang Low suggests in regards to the colonial context, are
important to the fantasy of cross-dress because they are “superficial” and can always be removed
when one needs to revert to reassert one’s racial or cultural superiority. I agree with Low that it
is the transitory nature of this boundary breaking which Badran puts Sha’rawi in that is
significant. In Harem Years, the images do not provide a context as to why or when Sha’rawi
99
Indeed, Huda was blind to her class privilege, which is made evident by the episode in which Huda, Rushdi
Hanim decide to build a tennis court in Mustafa Riad Basha’s garden. She writes in Mudhakkirat Huda Sha’rawi,
Often we would exercise in the Giza and its gardens. And our discussion would often be around looking for
a practical, feasible way to reach the improvement of the Egyptian woman’s case… We settled on starting
our project by directing the woman to practice physical exercise first … we decided to establish a tennis
court.(99)
The project ultimately fails, -- “ I will not forget the disappointment and failure that ensured when we explained the
matter to our ladies [the invitees] (100)” -- when, during the opening ceremony, none of the women present set foot
on the tennis court. This episode exposing Huda’s blindness to her class privilege does not appear in Harem Years.
100
Badran 85.
101
Badran 90.
102
Reina Lewis, Rethinking Orientalism, 213.
78
was donning these clothes. Instead, she is reduced to being a mere model for different attire, in
keeping with the idea that the Orient is a space full of enticing goods to be bought, savored and
worn. This de-contextualization of the images, coupled with the range of cross-cultural clothes
suggests that Sha’rawi is dressing up in costumes. This also aids in accentuating the ahistorical
nature of the narrative.
The images described above, along with their captions, render Sha’rawi in an Orientalist
light, evacuating her from any power that she may yield (either, problematically, by virtue of her
class, as evidenced in her image wearing the peasant clothes). Furthermore, the range of clothes
that she is photographed in – Western, Eastern, and classed – further remove her from the
nationalist project that she was so heavily devoted to. Here, domesticating her in the harem
asserts her voicelessness, her subservience and disassociated from her political activism and
nationalist motivations; whereas, in the Arabic version, Sha’rawi’s descriptions of performances
of domesticity, as well as her domesticating a polyglot, multi-layered language into a Modern
Standard Arabic marks her nationalist affiliations and her self-conscious participation in writing
Egypt’s political history.
*
An epilogue functions as a comment on or a conclusion to what has happened. In the
Harem Years, the epilogue, unlike the main text, concerns itself heavily with the politics of the
time. The political events that concern the epilogue condense approximately three hundred pages
of political communiqués, newspaper articles, and recounts from the Arabic version. In brief,
they detail the events of the 1919 demonstration, the contentious relationship between Sa’d
Zaghloul and Ali Sha’rawi, Huda Sha’rawi’s rise to political power, her relationship with Sa’d
Zaghloul, the evolution of the Wafd party and their inconsistent allegiance to women’s
79
liberation, Sha’rawi’s founding of the Egyptian Feminist Union in 1923, her travel to the
International Alliance of Women in Rome.
As mentioned previously, here, Badran abandons the first person point of view and
includes large quotes from the Arabic memoirs. The abandoning of the first person signals a
break in genre. Here, more images appear depicting the political climate of the time: an image of
Sa’d Zaghloul; crowds in front of the Zaghloul house during the revolution; several images of
groups of women demonstrating in the street. Significantly, the last image of the Epilogue
recognizes Sha’rawi for her political accomplishments, for it shows her wearing the Nishan al-
Kamal: “the highest state decoration of Egypt for services rendered to the country.”
103
However,
the photograph situates her outside of the door to her Cairo house. The door is imposing, and its
darkness overpowers the image of the older Sha’rawi, who places her hand on it. The power of
the symbolism of her standing on the outside of the door is inescapable; however, even if she is
presumably on the outside of the door, its sway over her remains. In sum, even in the section
detailing Sha’rawi’s political life, albeit in third person and outside of the purvey of the main
text, the specter of the harem remains.
Moreover, what is of interest to me in the Epilogue is the repetition of the incident of the
un-veiling, that which began the introduction of the text. Badran repeats, “It was upon their
return from this feminist conference that Huda and Saiza took off their veils in the dramatic
incident recounted in the beginning of the Introduction.”
104
This circling around serves several
functions: first, it suggests that Egyptian women (regardless of class) struggled only with the
issue of the veil; and, second, we are made to establish a causal relationship between traveling
abroad and returning to Cairo and unveiling. Third, that Badran chooses to end her translation
103
Badran 136.
104
Badran 129.
80
with the same event that begins it speaks to this stagnation of the discourse on women’s
“liberation”.
Conclusion
Concerned with the complicated narration of a female self, and with reframing variant
definitions of domesticity’s relationship to political consciousness, this chapter offers a chance to
reconsider the historical tensions between eastern and western cultures and bring nuance to the
understanding of their current manifestations. Through a mixture of historical and textual
analysis that attends among other subjects to matters of genre, market, narrative strategy and
reception, I have argued that a historicized and politicized form of unpacking translation reveals
differences of class, language and dialect, and gender that are obfuscated by translation practices
that attend only to the literary and textual. Studying both sources is therefore a dual project of
historical recuperation and postcolonial cultural analysis. I have been centrally concerned with
tracing what is lost and what is gained in translation, examining the intertwined shifts of
language and literary context that a work can incur as it moves from its point of origin out into a
new cultural sphere. Situating these translations in terms of not only the literary and textual, but
also the historical and political is to emphasize that what may seem like purely aesthetic, textual
choices (for example, reordering the narrative in a more chronologically linear way, or doing
away with the newspaper archive and emphasizing the personal over the impersonal) have
import in the way that Arab women are rendered and the way their narratives are taken up in
service of essentializing tropes of Arab women.
Equally importantly, this chapter advocates for a renewed focus on language. Haun
Saussy, Emily Apter, and Zhang Longxi argue for what is referred to as something
approximating “literariness,” in our comparative readings so that the “language politics” -- to use
81
Apter’s phrase in reference to the multiple zones through which language operates -- are not
elided by modes of reading. Language, Saussy tells us, must “be recognized as something more
than a delivery system for content,” rather, it should “be understood as having a weight and
resistance of its own.” Emily Apter cites Lawrence Venuti’s phrase, an “ethics of location,” in
reference to the idea that the culture or national space in which a work is translated affects not
only how the work is translated but also the value that a given work is ultimately awarded. There
is no such thing as “pure literature delinked from the market” nor a “pure public” to which
literature is addresses.
82
CHAPTER TWO:
HOME AS METAPHOR FOR THE NATION-STATE IN LATIFA AL-ZAYYAT’S THE
OPEN DOOR AND THE OWNER OF THE HOUSE
From every one of these places, even the prison, even those which I had to change every night, I
came out with a lot, and in each one I also left a lot of that perpetually changing person who was
and who will be. But the strange thing is that when I think about what a house is, in the sense of
a home, I rank all these places as just stopping points. The fact remains that I have no home and
that I have only ever had two homes in my life, the old house and the house which the police
sealed up with wax in the Sidi Bishr desert in March 1949. The old house was my fate and my
heritage. The house at Sidi Bishr was my creation and my choice. Perhaps because the two have
made up an invisible part of my being, perhaps because I belonged to them both to the same
degree and never managed to prefer one or other, the course of my life was distorted in the end.
–Latifa al-Zayyat, The Search
“Even the Women Came out of their Houses”
The opening scene of Latifa al-Zayyat’s 1960s novel The Open Door (حﻮﺘﻔﻤﻟا بﺎﺒﻟا /al-bab
al-maftouh) narrates a concert of unnamed voices expressing their reaction to the February 21,
1946 mass demonstrations against English colonialism – a nationalist movement unparalleled
since 1919 -- that took place in downtown Cairo.
1
One voice shares, “I’m telling you, this is a
nation of toughies – even the women came out of their houses. There were women all over the
place in bab al-sha’riya.”
2
The adverb “even” here used to describe the women, employed in
both the Arabic and the English, not only emphasizes an unexpected or surprising occurrence but
1
February 21, 1946 marks the violently met mass demonstrations, which took place as an expression of Egyptians’
resistance to Britain’s continued economic and martial control over Egypt. However, on that February day, British
rule was destabilized when thousands of Egyptian university students—forming the National Committee of Workers
and Students (NCWS), of which Latifa al-Zayyat was elected president -- held a meeting at which they called for
the abrogation of the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty (the treaty, intended to last twenty years, required the British to
withdraw all their troops, except those necessary to protect the Suez Canal and its surroundings) and a stop to
continued negotiations. Demanding full independence from British rule and the immediate evacuation of all military
forces, the students called for a general strike on February 9
st
. The British, in turn, reacted by driving four armored
cars past the barracks in Downtown Cairo and plowing into the Isma’iliya (now Tahrir) Square demonstration. The
students answered by attacking the cars and setting them on fire (Booth xx, xxi). These events marked the beginning
of the fight to end British occupation. For a comprehensive history of popular movements in modern Egypt, see
Joel Beinin and Zachary Lockman’s Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Communism, Islam, and the Egyptian
Working Class, 1882-1954, (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1998), especially chapter 10 “Communism
and the Egyptian Worker’s Movement, 1942—1948.
2
Al-Zayyat 4.
83
it is also used to make a comparison stronger. The phrase announces the gendered, temporal and
spatial limitations that the women transgressed, indicating that their presence in the public space
marks an element of surprise, marking them as unexpected participants in the struggle against
British occupation. Temporally, it establishes a time lag – women’s participation in the
resistance did not occur simultaneously with the men’s, rather, subsequent to it. Spatially, and
what most concerns the following analysis, the house is established in a dichotomous
relationship to the outside space – making it an exclusive feminine, apolitical space in opposition
to the heart of the demonstrations occurring in the square.
In this chapter, I turn to two of Latifa al-Zayyat’s historical novels – her first work, al-
bab el-maftouh, published in 1960 (the English translation, The Open Door was published in
2000), and her last novel, The Owner of the House, published in 1994 (ﺖﯿﺒﻟا ﺐﺣﺎﺻ / sahib al-beit
published in 1997). In these works bookending her career as a political activist, novelist and
English Professor at Ain Shams University in Cairo, al-Zayyat metaphorizes women’s position
in the nation-state through the trope of the domestic space. That is, each respective heroine’s
relationship to the physical space of the home reflects the political crises in which these works
are set and theorizes women’s political activism in the nation. Examining the changing
conceptualization of the home-as-nation metaphor, I argue, reveals the extent of women’s
involvement in Egyptian political history. In so doing, this chapter troubles an ahistorical
understanding of Egyptian women’s political activism while revaluing the domestic space as a
rich vantage point from which to articulate women’s political participation.
Latifa al-Zayyat: Writing as Political Activism
Writing for al-Zayyat, was an extension of her politics; it ran parallel to the social and
political developments in Egypt in the mid to late twentieth century: starting from complete
84
independence from English colonial rule in the fifties to the extreme surveillance of political
activists and intellectuals under Sadat’s rule. Her involvement in political protests started at an
early age. In 1946, when still a student at Cairo University, she was elected secretary general of
the National Committee of Students and Workers (NCSW) – a league that conceived of itself as
a gathering place for students who participated in the struggle against British colonialism. For
her political activism, Al-Zayyat was imprisoned twice. In 1949, she was charged with belonging
to a communist organization and conspiring to topple the regime. After her imprisonment, she
wrote and published The Open Door -- appearing eight years after the 1952 revolution.
Subsequent to the appearance of the novel, she did not publish any literary work for a period of
time, citing her disillusionment with Egyptian politics as her reason. After the defeat of Arab
armies in 1967, she felt deceived and “hated words, and consequently literature.”
3
In 1979,
during Anwar Sadat’s presidency, she co-founded and was president of the Committee for the
Defense of National Culture, which consisted of a group of writers and intellectuals who
opposed Sadat’s peace treaty with Israel and organized to raise awareness against the dangers of
the normalization of relations with Israel in the cultural sphere. Because of these involvements,
she was imprisoned in the Women’s Prison at el-qanater Prison for the second time in 1981, at
the age of fifty-eight, among more than fifteen hundred prominent public and opposition figures
arrested by Anwar Sadat, who had issued to restrict the rights of 15,000 people opposed to Camp
David. The Owner of the House, her last novel, was published in 1997, subsequent to her release
from el-qanater.
4
3
Hoda Al-sadda, “Latifa al-Zayyat: Gender and Nationalist Politics,” The Nation, Gender and the Arabic Novel:
Egypt 1892 –2008, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012) 98.
4
Central to the analysis of her position in the political realm is her relationship to her place of residence. Her
autobiographical novel, The Search, is a meditation and an ode, on the different places (and the relationships she
associated with these places) she inhabited – her childhood home, her marriage, her two different imprisonments.
She details her experience:
85
The home as metaphor for the nation
Al-Zayyat describes her writing architecturally. She considers The Open Door a “vast, organic,
architectural structures that develops naturally according to the law of necessity through the
struggle and its passing”
5
The novel dramatizes the beginning of the struggle of the Suez Canal
Crisis and the resulting Tripartite Aggression via the heroine, Layla’s, physical relationship to
her family’s home. The narrative is firmly set in historical time and in the space of downtown
Cairo. The first line, revealing the realism of the novel, states the date historically marked as the
beginning of the revolutionary tide: February 21st 1946. When the reader is introduced to
Layla’s family, each member’s spatial positioning within their apartment uncovers their
relationship to the changing political events that are about to unfold. Layla’s father, Muhmmad
Effendi Sulayman -- “civil servant in the Ministry of Finance and resident of the Astra Building,
No. 3 Ya’qub Street in the neighborhood of Sayyida Zaynab” -- sits “ensconced in a cushioned
wooden armchair facing the front door”
6
while, “ in the formal sitting room that adjoined the
front hall, Sulayman Effendi’s wife stood at the window…at the moment the upper half of that
when I married for the first time, a new phase of moving house began, this time prompted by the fact that
the political police were continually in pursuit of my husband, or me, or both of us. Between 1948 and
1949 we moved to five places, the last of which was my house in the Sidi Bishr desert, which is no longer a
desert. The police closed up the house and put wax seals on the doors. As well as the major moves I had to
make in this period, when the pursuit became violent, I had to move by night from place to place until I
found my home, in prison, in March 1949. My moving this time was not a matter of choice.” (The Search,
19).
Here, the metaphor of the house reveals al-Zayyat’s understanding of her position in her country, her sense of
belonging, and her sense of self. The novel begins with a return to her childhood home town in Damietta, where she
laments what has been lost. The return to her house becomes a catalyst for her exploration of her political activism,
an explanation of which is inextricable from an exploration of her various relationships with her two husbands and
her family members. She shares, “As I get to know Damietta, and through Damietta Egypt, I can see it and touch it
and hear its pulse, I smell it and taste it; I see it in everything I loved, everyone I loved and everything which I love
to see and love again”(18). Her sense of house as permeating her being, her psychology and her emotions echoes in
her fictional work. The house is not mere structure, but constitutes her sense of self. She understands her life and
Egypt’s political through the physical space she inhabits. Her belonging to her home reflects how she belonged to
the nation
5
Al-Zayyat, “My Experience of Writing” in The Owner of the House, 9.
6
Al-Zayyat, The Open Door, 5.
86
compact body hung so far out of the window that she seemed almost to dangle.”
7
The couple
waits for their son, Mahmoud, to return from the demonstrations, while the eleven-year old Layla
ends her parents’ silence and inaction by marching to the door and, threatening to open it,
proclaiming that she will go look for her brother.
8
The image of Sulayman Effendi sitting,
inactive, comfortable in his “cushioned wooden armchair,” simply watching the door belies his
passivity. He is as comfortable in his chair as he is comfortable in his position as effendi – one of
the effendiyya who “were the product of modern education, wore western-style clothing,
emulated European lifestyles, and working in the new occupations to which capitalist
development had given rise.”
9
That he is a civil servant in the ministry of finance solidifies his
complicity with the administration and reveals his middle class status. Similarly, the mother’s
positioning in the formal sitting room foreshadows her superficiality and obsession with social
status since the formal sitting room is furnished most expensively and lavishly and is the room in
which she entertains ladies of high society. Conversely, their young daughter, Layla, is the sole
person moving within the apartment, making her way to the door, and threatening to transgress
it. The door, evoked in the title of the novel, symbolizes the gateway to change and becomes a
7
Ibid.
8
In The Search, al-Zayyat chronicles her own political awakening, hints of which find echo in this passage in The
Open Door. Recounting the events of 1934, when she witnessed the English open fire on twenty-four demonstrators,
she marks her abandoning of the comforts and the stability of her familial home, “I find no refuge from the evils of
the world in my mother’s embrace at the age of eleven as I stand looking out from the balcony of our house on
Sahria El-Abbasi in Mansoura, no one there to help, neither my father trying to drag me off the balcony so that I do
not see and do not hear, nor my mother crying silently. I find no refuge from the sense of powerlessness, of distress,
of oppression that shakes me as the police shoot down twenty-four demonstrators that day, as I scream at my
inability to do anything, to go down into the street and stop the bullets flying from the black guns. I abandon the
child in me and the girl comes of age before time, weighed down with a knowledge wider than the limits of the
house, a knowledge that includes the entire nation. My future course in life was then determined. I was destined to
enter the door of commitment to the nation by the harshest and most violent door.” (41-42; emphasis mine) The
alienation and her distinction from the parents is echoed in both the fiction and the non-fiction accounts of the same
incident. Again, the door as symbol of change figures prominently.
9
Beinin and Lockman 10.
For more on effendiya and masculinity, see Wilson Chacko Jacob Working Out Egypt: Effendi Masculinity and
Subject Formation in Colonial Modernity, 1870—1940 (Duke University Press, 2011).
87
symbolic and physical marker between the bourgeois household of her parents and the outside,
political, revolutionary world.
The linear narrative continues and concerns itself with Layla’s consistent effort in
symbolically opening the door – not only through her political participation in the
demonstrations but also through her search for a husband.
10
Moving sequentially from one
historical event to the next -– the government’s cancelation of the 1936 treaty, her brother
Mahmoud’s decision to join the resistance in the Suez Canal, the Cairo Fire of January 1952, the
jailing of the protestors, the 1952 revolution and the successful dethroning of the King, Abd el
Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal, and, ultimately, Layla’s joining the national guard --
the narrative simultaneously details Layla’s search for a suitor: first Isam who betrays her with
the maid,
11
and, second, Professor Ramzi, who proves to be a hypocrite, lusting after her cousin.
The novel ends with Layla successfully having opened the door of her oppressive household --
being united with the most politically conscious and patriotic of her suitors, Husayn, at the start
of the Suez Canal crisis, away from Cairo.
Confinement across gendered lines
Layla’s parents’ intently keep their children inside the physical confines of the household in
an effort to maintain the status quo. In so doing, they establish a dichotomy between the
changing politics of the time and the inside of their house. Central to this opposition is the figure
of the door as barrier on different levels – physical, ideological, and national. Incidents of
Muhammed Effendi forcing his children inside the home abound. After he beats Layla in
punishment for her participating in the student demonstration, the door takes on a greater
10
Ellen McLarney’s “The Socialist Romance of the Postcolonial Arabic Novel,” Research in African Literatures
40.3 (2009): 186—205 offers a thoughtful analysis of the role of marriage in al-Zayyat’s novel.
11
McLarney has an eloquent reading of Isam’s relationship to Layla.
88
symbolic meaning. Trapping herself in her room, locking her parents out, Layla desperately
seeks a place to which she can escape. She laments,
I could close a hundred doors but they still wouldn’t go away. They won’t leave me alone,
they’re always there, even right now with the door shut tight. Always there, my father, my
mother, always there, bearing down on me, pressing down on my chest to squeeze my lungs
to nothing…. It’s always me and them, every single minute, me and them and the truth, the
sad, sad truth, me and them, pressing down on me, on my body, on my body stretched out in
the living room.”
12
Al-Zayyat here deploys the door to articulate larger critiques of oppression. The permeability of
the door reveals her inability to find a space in which she can escape from her parents. In her
parents’ home there is no space for her to feel alive, to articulate herself, to breathe or to be
herself. Here, her parents’ presence defies spatial confines; she experiences their oppression
through her body, trapping her life, and her breathing, exemplified in the repetition of the phrases
“always there” and “me and them.” She cannot escape her parents even within the privacy of the
physical space of her bedroom.
This confinement does not fall on gendered lines, for Mahmud is similarly subjected to the
same rules as his sister. Sulayman Effendi, regretting having allowed his son to leave the house
to join the demonstration, ponders, “If only he had given the boy a good thrashing and then had
locked him in – if he had just thrown him into a room and taken the key from the lock – then at
least he would know his son’s whereabouts.”
13
This trapping of Mahmud also doubles as a
stifling of political change, reflected in the father’s reaction to Mahmud’s joining the resistance.
Later in the novel, when Mahmud decides to join the resistance, he heatedly argues with his
father that if he does not join the resistance, he will remain a slave, even if he continues to pursue
a higher education (Mahmud was a student in the faculty of medicine, which was a hot bed for
12
Al-Zayyat, The Open Door, 52.
13
Ibid., 7.
89
political resistance). Sulayman Effendi asks his son, in an attempt to convince him to continue in
his own legacy and that of his father’s, “Here’s your father, alive and well and getting on just
fine, and your grandfather before him – are they slaves?” Mahmud answers, “Yes, of course – of
course they were slaves. Every soul who fails to struggle and fight in order to liberate himself
from imperialism is a slave.”
14
The exchange ends with him kicking Mahmud out of the house –
“If you do go, then you are no longer my son and I do not know you. You may not cross the
threshold of this house again.”
15
Here, Sulayman Effendi maintains the home as a site of
continuity and reproduction of familial legacy as well as his ideological position. It also
establishes familiar boundaries.
Mothers and Daughters and Sartorial Confinement
Sulayman Effendi’s violence, carried out as a means of keeping his children from
participating in the resistance, doubles as a manifestation of his allegiance to the colonial
government. Similarly, the mothers carry out a different but just as insidious type of violence and
containment through their objectification and control of the younger generation of women’s
bodies. Mother-daughter relationships are a central focus in the novel: Layla and her mother,
Saniya; Gamila, Layla’s maternal cousin, and her mother, Samira; Dawlat Hanim (and her sister
Samia Hanim), the most affluent member of Layla’s mother’s branch of the family society and
her deceased daughter, Safaa drive the narrative.
16
Much of the novel revolves around the young
14
al-Zayyat, The Open Door, 101.
15
Ibid., 101- 102.
16
Homosocial relationships -- embodied in Layla’s two best friends, Sanaa, and Adila-- are also key influences that
drive the novel. Her best friends also represent dichotomous ideals – the practical Adila, and Sanaa, the romantic,
who ultimately marries Layla’s brother. Poignantly, it is only the dreamer Sanaa who remains a key part of the
narrative, once Layla realizes her political consciousness at the end of the novel. All the other women disappear
from the narrative.
We understand the dark side of this bourgeois society more specifically through the tragic story of Safaa, Dawlat
Hanim’s daughter who had committed suicide after her mother’s refusal to rescue and shelter her from an unhappy,
90
Layla being inculcated in how to properly behave as a woman in order to attract a husband. Since
the space of the home doubles for that of the nation, the type of space that the mothers aim to
reproduce is one based on material possession, deceit, and a relentless upholding of social
standing. This is metaphorized in the descriptions and consumption of western imported
materials -- the mothers’ sole concern. For example, within the household, the elite women are
always described in relation to the furniture they sit on: “Layla could envision Samia Hanim in
her parlor, jumping up from the lacquered wood fauteuil with its Aubusson upholstery as if
disaster had just hit.”
17
The bourgeois women’s identity is consistently linked with the western
materials they consume. They are reduced to the materials – clothes, household appliances and
furniture -- that surround them and that they wish to consume.
Both forms of confinement of the body – either in the household, or in clothes -- eschew
political change. The mothers’ understanding of the operations of a household, an understanding
they (unsuccessfully) attempt to instill in Layla, is one built on unequal economic exchange. For
the mothers, the rules of propriety demand an adherence to a strict set of rules, or usul. In Arabic
usul, the plural of asl translates to “the foundation,” “the basis,” and “the origins.” However, the
mothers’ usul are not concerned with a pre-colonial vision; rather they rest on western consumer
ideology which paves the way for upward social mobility, based on a consumption of household
goods that economically benefits the English colonial power. Their adherence to the ‘usul not
although socially lucrative, marriage. Layla is aghast that neither Dawlat Hanim nor the society she keeps doubted
the wisdom of her actions. Dawlat Hanim’s social standing, in fact, grows after her daughter’s death since her
actions reflect her unwavering allegiance to the rules of bourgeois society – an artificial maintaining of outward
appearances even at the event of suicide. Layla’s reaction betrays her consciousness and the differences between
her mother’s society and her own ideologies, “So Dawlat Hanim, playing the game, had killed her daughter. But she
had been right to do so for she followed the basic rules of the game…. What about their consciences? Didn’t they
have any? No, it seemed not. What was important was the appearance of things. What people saw was what counted.
(45)” When Layla launches a critique of Dawlat Hanim’s heartless treatment of her daughter, Layla’s mother
silences her, refusing to jeoporidize her good standing with an elite member of society.
17
Al-Zayyat, The Open Door, 34.
These French words are transliterated in the Arabic original and are placed in Italics in the English translation.
91
only sees marriage as a mere economic exchange but it also calls for the confinement of the
woman’s body in western imported materials that enhance her figure. At the time that Layla
comes of age, her mother’s affluent friend, Dawlat Hanim, says to her, “The girl has to have a
proper dress, one that reveals her shape, and she needs a corset to lift her breasts and keep her
middle in…. And like any girl – if she doesn’t dress right, she won’t bring any sort of price in the
market.”
18
Ellen McLarney’s reading of the novel concludes that in their calculus, a specific
adherence to a feminine outward appearance will yield a profitable marriage. Thus, the suitor
with the highest bid is awarded the most adorned bride.
The mother’s focus on dresses, fabric and material goods reflects the consumer concerns of
the time – concerns heavily imbricated in the political terrain. Historian Nancy Reynolds
theorization of consumer culture in 1950s Egypt and its relation to colonial power is helpful here
to understand the colonial ethos of Dawlat Hanim’s advice. Scenes describing the family
shopping trips in the shopping center Circurel for fabrics for Gamila’s wedding detail the various
European fabrics purchased: drapee, chiffon
19
and Gibere lace in a color called simone.
20
Doing
so draws attention to the ways that consumer goods, like “a proper dress”, “a corset to lift her
breasts”
21
, disciplines the physical body to conform to an economy of exchange where the
wealthiest male suitor marries the woman wearing the finest imported materials. Their upholding
18
Al-Zayyat, The Open Door, 41.
19
Ibid., 113.
20
Ibid., 114.
Reynolds elucidates Egyptians’ relationship to the French language: “Many Egyptian nationalists preferred French
language and culture to English, in part for aesthetic reasons and in part because of the structure of education in
Egypt but also as a sort of anticolonial protest against their British overlords…Some Egyptians under British
colonial rule adopted French cultural mores and language to signal their modernity while still protesting the politics
of the colonial situation. Later, more populist nationalist found the division between French and British cultures
specious, arguing that there was amore generalized European cultural dominance, although by then many of the
European practices and clothing styles were so engrained in Egyptian society as to make them local for many
middle-class Egyptians (14-15).”
21
Ibid., 41.
92
of a strict difference between genders, which calls for men to be buyers and women as objects to
be sold, renders the female body into a commodity like the European materials that they
purchase. The woman’s worth is only in its exchange value for upward social mobility. Thus, the
mothers articulate an understanding of women’s position in the household, and in the nation as
an extension, as one necessitating a hierarchical subservience to the wealthiest suitor.
The novel’s concern with fabric and clothing is no mere coincidence since Egypt’s main
export was cotton; textiles and fabrics were part and parcel of the politics of the time. In the
1930s and 1940s, thirteen of the forty-five enterprises employing over five hundred workers in
Egypt were located in the textile sector. These workers came to form the core of the Egyptian
workers’ movement – the committee of which al-Zayyat was the head.
22
These unionized
workers were instrumental in destabilizing the colonial hold on Egypt. Beinin and Lockman site
that in 1947, of the 137 officially recorded strikes, sixty six percent occurred in the textile
industry.
23
Al-Zayyat’s characterization of the mothers’ obsession with material goods functions as a
critique of consumer ideology, which directly links to the politics of the time. Again, this critique
is reflected in terms of the purchase of clothes. One day Layla asks her mother,
‘Mama, couldn’t you have just gotten me two dresses instead of three, and then bought me
two undershirts? All of my underwear is falling apart.’ But what was it her mother had said
in response? ‘People don’t see your underwear. What’s important is a good appearance.’
24
Thus, women become mere extensions of, and are reduced to, the western fabrics and goods that
they consume – the fauteuil that Samia Hanim sits on with the Aubusson upholstery, the Gibere
22
Beinin and Lockman 273.
23
Ibid. 274.
24
Al-Zayyat, The Open Door, 45.
93
lace Gamila wears for her engagement party. Women become recepticles on display. Reynolds
attests that “objects of consumption acted as vehicles of community in ways that brought
nationalism into completely different registers of corporeality and intimacy because of the effects
of material objects on people.”
25
The grave consequences of the worship of imported material good, which will buy
women a bourgeois household with European appliances in an elite neighborhood is best
exemplified in the trajectory of Gamila’s courtship relations, marriage ceremony and conjugal
life. Gamila internalizes her conniving mother’s materialism -- “she wants the car, she wants that
Frigidaire, and the solitaire, and—.”
26
However, through her failed marriage, we come to
understand that the grips of the mothers and the consumer ideology they espouse is waning,
signaling a shift in the political climate. It also serves as a warning sign for Layla. This is most
apparent in the scene set on the day that has come to be known as Black Saturday, January 26,
1952, called by historians the “death spasm of the monarchical regime”
27
when angry Egyptian
crowds, responding to British troops’ capturing and killing numbers of Egyptian police in the
town of Isma’iliya, on the Suez Canal, rioted through the streets of Cairo attacking and burning
symbols of imperial power and privilege, including British luxurious department stores: Circurel,
25
Nancy Reynolds, Cairo Consumed: Urban Commerce, the Cairo Fire, and the Politics of Decolonization in Egypt
(Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012) 8.
Furthermore Ellen McLarney elaborates on the mother’s usul by pointing out that Al-Zayyat’s critique of the
bourgeois middle class and its materialistic values is launched on the level of language. That is, when preparing for
Gamila’s wedding to Ali Bey, the detailed exchanges between the family members in regards to the materials they
are to buy for the wedding and engagement in western department stores like “Cicurel” where all the “best people”
go (66) is peppered with transliterated English and French words like “drapee”, “chiffon” (113) “Gibere” lace (114)
so they can care about what is a la mode and “au courant”. This is further solidified with all the material comforts
that the physically repulsive, fat Ali Bey will provide Gamila when they are married. He will buy her a “Frigadore”
and a “Ford”. In a project that is deeply rooted in the politics of the local, and language being one of the key
features of the local, the English and French words invade the Arabic text and serve as a metaphor for the western
influences of Egyptian values and nationalism. I will return to the discussion of language later on in this chapter.
26
Al-Zayyat, The Open Door, 78.
27
quoted in Reynolds 6.
94
Chemla, Orosdi-Back, Benzion, Ades, Chalons, ORECO ,and Roberts Hughes.
28
Reynolds
details, “Most downtown streets remained impassable for days because of the acrid-smelling
piles of burned merchandise. One observer noted that littered through the streets were ‘carcasses
of automobiles still smoking’ and ‘cardboard boxes from which were sticking out a pair of socks,
a necktie or a scarf, [and] half-burned shirts.’”
29
This striking, memorable image of intimate
articles of clothing displayed sorely out of place in the streets, suggests the imminent emptying
out of the space of the household and the nation of the infesting colonial rule and the establishing
of a new household and a new nation. No object is too trivial – even socks are imbued with
symbolism – to articulate the upheaval of the household.
In the scene depicting this historical event, Gamila stands on the rooftop of their
residential building, wearing her white wedding dress, which her mother had just purchased from
one of the now-burning department stores, while the rest of her family watches the city being
engulfed in fire. This chilling image foregrounds the beginning of the decline of British rule and
the dark cloud that hangs over Gamila’s marriage. The clothes burning below the family
residence signal the waning of colonial rule and the precarity of the household that Gamila is
going to inhabit. Ultimately, Gamila’s apartment on Pyramid Street -- the fulfillment of her
mother’s materialistic dreams -- proves oppressive leading her to attempt suicide. At Layla’s
engagement party to Dr. Ramzi, which Gamila hosts at her expensive apartment, Layla discovers
her having an affair with Sidqi. Desperately explaining her miserable life, Gamila shares,
That bed, there, in front of you. I slept there for three days between life and death. I’d
swallowed a bottle of aspirin. My mother said, ‘I don’t want any scandals.’ And she knew
perfectly well what it meant for me to stay with a man who doesn’t love me. One I don’t
love. But it didn’t make any difference. She was absolutely determined…. It was as if she
28
Reynolds 1,2.
29
Ibid. 2.
95
knew instinctively that Layla was in the same situation and would inevitably come to the
same end.
30
The broader contexts of political and social power – deceit, materialism, cheating, possession –
are metaphorized in the women’s marriage choice. Furthermore, the materials of the household –
the domestic goods and the house equipped with western imported furniture—become emblems
of the sociopolitical elements that the revolution tries to overthrow. Materialism, consumerism,
and confinement is the space from which Layla needs to open the door
The new world outside of the open door
Layla’s struggle centers around her attempts to symbolically open the door to a world
beyond deception, materiality, and consumerism -- elements on which the bourgeois household
and colonialism hinge and are perpetuated. In contrast to the confines of the social rules of
behavior, loveless marriages, obsession with social standings, and western imported fabrics and
furniture, the descriptions of the insistent, continuous surge of waves serve as a metaphor for the
nation’s call for freedom. The narrator describes the participants in the demonstration against
colonial rule. Figured spatially, the call for freedom moves forward, away from Layla’s parents’
household and the ideals to which they are tethered:
… the crowd pushed forward without mercy, pushing her further from her father, his face
very dark indeed, and away from the image of her mother, her lips even paler now. Her
father vanished from sight and she saw only the crowd of thousands, and herself melting
into the whole. Everything around her propelling her forward, everything, everyone,
surrounding her, embracing her, protecting her.
31
Here, the parents’ household is replaced with a collective, with the surge to advance spatially and
temporally -- to progress, and to another era, all that which a revolution promises. The collective
of the nuclear family unit is replaced by the “melting into the whole” of the united masses.
30
Al-Zayyat, The Open Door, 279.
31
Ibid., 51.
96
These images echo al-Zayyat’s description of her own personal experience as a political
activist in the 1952 Revolution as transforming her body: “from the cloak of contact with the
masses I was born and from their warmth and stability I was transformed.”
32
Al-zayyat combines
mothering imagery – being born, feeling warmth and stability – with political transformation.
This link adheres to the semantic link embedded in the term nation: being born (nāt-, past
participial stem of nāscī to be born). The birthing imagery and the newness evoke an alternative
family structure – the antithesis of the nuclear, bourgeois family the novel critiques. The Marxist
resonances apparent in the evocation of the collective reflect al-Zayyat’s coming to political
consciousness. She shares in her autobiographical novel, “By the time I was in university, I lost
all hope in the existing parties... What appealed to me very much in Marxism … was the ethics…
the absence of discrimination in religion, race, sex…. I was tired of the hypocrisy, cowardice,
caution and trembling of the class I belonged to.”
33
These Marxist tones reverberate throughout
the novel. Freedom from the confines of Layla parents’ household or the male suitors the parents
approve of is reflected in her rejection of the space of the household and joining in the masses.
When Layla is exasperated with her situation with Professor Ramzi, she retreats to her window
and opening it, the narrator reflects: “She longed to be part of one of these human waves that
passed below, rejoicing and triumphant, along the boulevard.”
34
This desire to belong to the
waves of the masses is actualized in the last scenes of the novel with the victory at the Suez
Canal, which marked the beginning of the Tripartite Assault. “The streets of Port Said were
32
Al-Zayyat, The Search, 104.
33
Quoted in Selma Botman’s The Rise of Egyptian Communism, 1939-1970, (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press,
1988) 24.
34
Al-Zayyat, The Open Door, 317.
97
packed with people, colliding waves, as if all its homes had emptied themselves, tossing the
inhabitants into the street, wave after wave, to blend into a turbulent human sea.”
35
Al-Zayyat metaphorizes the revolutionary spirit in water imagery throughout the novel.
36
After Mahmud decides to join the Suez Canal, the narrator describes the embryonic stage of
nationalist uprising in the natural battle between a spring (2.a. a flow of water rising or issuing
naturally out of the earth, OED), which represents newness both in Arabic and in English, and a
bog – (a piece of wet spongy ground, consisting chiefly of decayed or decaying moss, OED),
which stands in for stagnation, decay, and stasis:
It rushes forth, a clear, bubbling spring. The bogs, though, have done their best to block
its passage. Intent on sucking that lovely running water dry, they try to absorb it into
themselves, to consume it completely, to transform it with their sluggishness into a
stagnant pond. The spring is still young, nevertheless, buoyant with life, excitable and
deep; and the bogs are ancient, sedimented over their many years of existence, crouching
in quiet defiance across the land of Egypt… The bogs lie in sure wait, chiding the stream.
There is nothing to be gained by pushing on, young friend, no use in rushing ahead.
37
The “bubbling” enthusiastic “ebullient” “spring,” the young generation of nationalist represented
by Layla, Mahmud, and Husayn, contrasts with the “”voracious” sodden earth” and “dam of
solid rock,” which personify the older generation of Layla’s family. At this particular historical
juncture narrated in the novel, there is an impasse to the fervor of the revolution and change, a
35
Ibid., 361.
36
This finds echo in the narratives of the 2011 “uprisings.” Wiam El-Tamami, a writer and political activist deploys
similar imagery to critique myopic representations of the uprisings proliferating in the international media, “The
modes of telling: reporting that a rock, somewhere, dropped into water, while telling nothing of the water, of the
ripples.” (“A Wish not to Betray, ” Translating Dissent, ed. Mona Baker 2016) 29. Similarly, Khalid Abdalla, an
activist, actor and film-maker describes the events of the 2011 Uprising as a “series of feedback mechanisms, like
concentric ripples of water moving in and out, has gradually turned to noise for everyone.” (“Changing Frames and
Fault Lines,” Translating Dissent, ed. Mona Baker 2016) 34.
37
Al-Zayyat, The Open Door, 97.
This image of the sea is repeated in al-Aayyat’s autobiographical novel The Search, “A sea of youth ripples over
Abbas Bridge in 1946 and the young woman who found refuge in the whole is a drop in the sea, wild joy in she and
powerful, active strength, and the ego – the ego has meaning, because it has become one with the others. A sea of
youth swells on Abbas Bridge. The roaring sound it makes works loose the tent pegs of the old colonialism, while
the new colonialism lies in wait (43).”
98
blocking of forward movement. For this passage appears prior to Mahmud and Isam
announcement to their reticent families their decision to join the resistance in the Canal Zone.
The parents ask, revealing their stagnant mentality, “What could a handful of volunteer fighters
possibly achieve, facing a British army lavishly stocked with the latest thing in armaments?”
38
Mahmud leaves, after his father disowns him (“You may not cross the threshold of this house
again”
39
) while Isam, having been fooled by his mother’s faking jumping out the window,
remains behind.
The watery symbol of the revolution (the spring) and its resistance (the trenchant bogs)
reappear at the end of the novel, after the news of the Israelis attack on Sinai on October 29,
1956. However, the spring has now gained strength and has been transformed into a cataract -- a
flood. The narrator describes this momentum,
It gushes forth, a storming cataract. The bogs, though, have done their best to block its
course. Intent on sucking its waters dry, they try to consume it within themselves, to
transform it with their sluggishness into a stagnant pond. But the cataract’s depths are
recalcitrant, colossal, raging and deep. And the bogs are ancient, sediments over their
many years of existence, crouching in quiet defiance over the land of Egypt.
40
The description “intent on sucking its waters dry” reflects the older generation resistance
to revolution and political change and resonates with Professor Ramzi’s effect on Layla body,
which is repeatedly described using water imagery. Before he makes his romantic interest in her
known, in his capacity as her professor, the effect he has on her is parasitic: “She felt as if he
were drinking her blood drop by drop, in anticipation of the moment in which it would have all
dried up….. ”
41
In another incident describing his disparaging of her in front of her classmates,
38
Ibid., 99.
39
Ibid., 102.
40
Ibid., 327.
41
Ibid., 229.
99
and belittling her philosophical arguments, the narrator describes his treatment of her in the
following way: “Dr. Ramzi went on drinking her blood, his words like a hammer in a worker’s
fist, demolishing whatever resisted, day after day.”
42
After he proposes marriage and their
wedding day approaches, Layla’s friends describe her “as if the water of life had dried up in
her”
43
– equating a conjugal life void of passion and mutual desire to dryness, and aridity.
Similarly Gamila, stuck in a sexually unfulfilling marriage, because of her valuing of material
wealth over passion, equality and compatibility, deploys the metaphor of aridity in describing her
unloved, undesired body. She tells Layla: “Do you know how a woman feels when she realizes
that she’s become like an old rag? She’s all dried out – her body has dried out ... because no one
looks at her with a glow in his eyes, no one says to her, ‘I love you.’”
44
Tying revolutionary
fervor to the female body and its sexual urges, Al-Zayyat reorients the battle for the nation’s
independence in sexual terms. In so doing, women’s sexual satisfaction becomes a metaphor for
the nation’s independence. A nation that operates on equality – emblematic in the Marxist echoes
in the descriptions of the revolutionary tide – is independent.
45
Water imagery is not only used to describe the revolutionary fervor, but it also serves as
the backdrop of the scenes of the lovers, highlighting the difference between the marriage
matches made by the mothers and those made by those who embody the spirit of the revolution.
42
Ibid., 231.
43
Ibid., 306.
44
Ibid., 279.
45
Scholars have already talked about Layla being an allegory for the land but they have said that her fulfilling her
role as wife as incompatible with a feminism. Mention Maraa’s article. No doubt Layla can be read as a national
allegory. However this is different from the national allegory and Ahmed and Jameson. He writes to Layla while he
is in Germany,”… [y]ou have become a symbol for all I love in my nation. When I think of Egypt, I think of you;
when I long for Egypt, I long for you.” (217). Undoubtely, Layla is a symbol of Egypt. I would argue that “symbol”
functions differently from the postcolonial theorization of it. Whereas the woman-as-nation trope in other
postcolonial literature ossifies the woman, banning her from participating in the national struggle (mention literature
here), here the fact that Layla symbolizes Egypt for Husayn triggers a desire for solidarity and commitment to her, a
solidarity and a commitment whose mode of articulation is love.
100
The scenes featuring the two most politically active couples -- Layla and Husayn and Mahmud
and his lover Sanaa – are set in the ocean. Sanaa and Mahmud first fall in love while swimming
in the water in Ras al-Barr, where “a current seemed to flow between them, connecting them.”
46
When Sanaa describes the person she wants to marry she says, “I want to sail…. .”
47
Here, the
purity of the water, the naturalness of it is tied to their love, as well as to the revolution,
contrasting with the materialism and consumerism of the usul of the mothers and Layla’s two
other suitors.
Ultimately, Layla’s choice in spouse is Husayn, who is also part of the national
engineering team assigned to design the High Dam in Aswan, underscoring his nationalist
devotion, as well as his devotion to the land. What further solidifies this is his village upbringing.
In sharp contrast to Isam and Professor Ramzi’s class-based ideologies, Husayn was raised in a
small village, outside of Cairo, among people “working so hard, sweating, the sight of them so
rough and hard concealing their overwhelming ability to love, to give, to sacrifice.”
48
Here al-
Zayyat relies on a traditional trope that establishes people in the village as closer to the land,
more pure, more humble, less affected by the materialistic concerns and selfishness of the city
inhabitants and the corruption that comes with modernity, colonization, and consumerism.
49
Before Husayn moves to Germany for his scholarship, Layla and he meet at the beach, where he
tries to assuage her pain of Isam’s betrayal and convince her that she should love him. Once
again, he employs water as a metaphor to describe her road to fulfillment, which is
simultaneously Egypt’s road to liberation from the English colonial occupation, and a road which
46
Al-Zayyat, The Open Door, 202.
47
Ibid., 211.
48
Ibid., 184.
49
Samah Selim’s elaborates on the representation of the rural in the Egyptian novel in her book The Novel and the
Rural Imaginary in Egypt, 1880—1985 (New York and London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004).
101
leads – both Layla and Egypt -- to his love. He says to her, “Well, suppose the sea is story, the
waves terrible high. To reach shore…we have to face the waves and the open ocean. [at the
shore] you’ll find what it is that you’ve lost, you’ll find yourself, you’ll find the true Layla.”
50
Husayn’s words stay with Layla and become a refrain she repeats and elaborates on, making her
an active contributor to the vision that Husayn has for her and for Egypt. The image of the door
that is the focal point of the novel reappears: “She saw herself walking steadily to a closed door
and giving it a push. She stood on a threshold meeting the rays of light that flooded across her in
a warm embrace. With a final glance at the dark room in which she had been held, she walked
forward, light welling up around her.”
51
These architectural references of a household -- the
door, the threshold, the “dark room” of her and Egypt’s colonial and oppressive past contrasting
with the light that Husayn and the revolution promise – all implicate the national struggle in
spatial terms of the household and allow her to actively participate in imagining her position
within the body politic.
In keeping with al-Zayyat’s politics, Husayn’s love for Layla and for Egypt is predicated
on a profound understanding of a collective solidarity and a rejection of the self. Echoing
repeated descriptions of Layla’s desire to lose herself in the crowds, his allegiance to the
collective is evident in a love letter he writes her:
Let go, my love, run forward, connect yourself to others, to the millions of others, to that
good land, our land, to the good people, ours. Then you will find love … It is a love that
makes one grow: love of the nation, love for its people. So let go, my love, run forward,
fling the door open wide, and leave it open. And on the open road you will find me, my
love. I will be waiting for you, because I have confidence in you.
52
50
Al-Zayyat, The Open Door, 190-191
51
Ibid., 219.
52
Ibis., 210-211.
This echoes al-Zayyat’s views in regards to her involvement in the leftist organizations, “One of the basic teachings
of Marxism is that the individual cannot be free or liberated without his society being free and liberated. Women’s
fight for liberation implies a fight for the liberation of society.” (Quoted in Selma Botman, “Portrait of the
102
Husayn’s love is based on a mutual devotion, as opposed to an unequal economic exchange ---
like that of Gamila, and Isam’s affair with the maid. The open door that he evokes promises a
new kind of relationship, different from the one based on betrayal, inequality, and materialism—
all reflections of the colonial enterprise.
53
Ultimately, Layla’s reunion with Husayn is figured
spatially. When she sees him again after a long absence, she is at the threshold of the door of
Sanaa and Mahmud’s apartment:
On the threshold of the open door Layla stood facing Husayn… He had come to visit
assuming that she would be bound to another man … and now he discovered, standing on
the threshold of the open door, that she was his beloved, his, all for him.
54
The new nation, as embodied in Layla and Husayn’s union, on the other side of the open
door, demands communal expulsion from the family and rejection of the past. Layla has to break
from the physical confines of her family’s home in order to join the national struggle, for her
family’s ideologies are markedly incompatible with that of the revolution.
Previous readings on The Open Door are too quick to dismiss Layla as an allegory for the
new independent nation and thus incongruent with a “feminist” message. On the one hand, there
is no doubt Layla can be read as a national allegory. Indeed, Husayn writes to Layla while he is
in Germany,”… [y]ou have become a symbol for all I love in my nation. When I think of Egypt,
Communist Movement, The Rise of Egyptian Communism, 1939-1970 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998)
26.
53
What further solidifies his linking to the masses is his village upbringing. Orphaned at a young age and estranged
from his sister (he has to be alone, orphaned, this further solidifies the new family/ nation that they’re going to
build), Husayn was raised in a Delta town on a farm among people, “Working so hard, sweating, the sight of them
so rough and hard concealing their overwhelming ability to love, to give, to sacrifice (184).” Here al-Zayyat relies
on a traditional trope used in post-independence literature that sets up people in the village as closer to the land,
more pure, more humble, less affected by the materialistic concerns and selfishness of the city inhabitants and the
corruption that comes with modernity, colonization, materialism. Samah Selim’s The Novel and the Rural Imaginary
in Egypt, 1880-1985, (New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004) presents a thoughtful examination of this trope.
54
Al-Zayyat, The Open Door, 356. (emphasis added)
103
I think of you; when I long for Egypt, I long for you.”
55
However, I would argue that “symbol”
functions differently from the postcolonial theorization of it. Whereas the woman-as-nation trope
in other postcolonial literature ossifies and essentializes “the woman”, banning her from
participating in the national struggle, here the fact that Layla symbolizes Egypt for Husayn
triggers a desire for solidarity and commitment to her, a solidarity and a commitment whose
mode of articulation is love.
This union has been read as incompatible with a feminist politics. In Mara Naaman’s “The
Anti-Romance Antidote: Revisiting Allegories of the Nation” she writes,
…. This work is at once a traditional, virtually formulaic romance that may be read
allegorically as a kind of foundational fiction chronicling the birth of an independent
Egypt…. While al-Zayyat’s work challenges traditional representations of female
subjectivity, and is a feminist text in every respect, it undermines its own intentions by
falling prey to a formulaic scheme where ‘required love is the foundational moment’ for the
birth of the nation. This ultimate outcome, of course, only reifies the traditional valuing of
women as mothers and wives, despite the protagonist’s strong-willed determination to
actualize herself as a liberated woman.
I take issue with Naaman’s critique since it rests on a paradigm that establishes “liberation” and
“tradition” as polar opposites. For Naaman, the feminism operating here is incompatible with the
protagonist being part of a family or being connected to a male figure, which “undermines” al-
Zayyat’s liberation project. I suggest, however, that the door of the old household opens to the
beginning of the revolution, to an egalitarian union based on love, and hope for the success of the
war. The novel thus sees the heroine’s political activism as linked to her fulfilling her role as
wife but as rejecting her parents’ household and those with whom they associate. The last words
of the novel read: “ “This is just the beginning, my love.”
56
55
Ibid, 217.
56
Ibid., 364.
104
Al-Zayyat’s chronicling of Layla’s simultaneous awakening into political and sexual
consciousness punctures and interrogates hegemonic scholarship that sees the trajectory towards
liberation as culminating in individuation. Instead, al-Zayyat’s presents an egalitarian
relationship as the vision for the new independent nation. Just as the hope for the new
independent nation is to break from a tradition that subjugated it to colonial rule, the
protagonist’s heterosexual union necessitates a break from the traditional courtship practices and
modes of behavior.
Revolution in Language and Form
I have argued that Layla’s successful movement from the inside to the outside of the
home in order to fulfill her role as political activist troubles the persistent stereotype that sees
Arab women as tethered to the confines of their home, and, as such, barred from political
participation. A reader unfamiliar with the incommensurabilities between the English language
and the Arabic language is unaware of other demarcations that al-Zayyat puts into crisis – those
between the Egyptian dialect and Modern Standard Arabic.
57
In the original Arabic novel, the
distinction between the narrative voice and the characters’ voice is clear: the narration is written
in formal, eloquent fusha; the long passages of dialogue, the mechanism that propels the novel
forward echoing the urgency and fervor of the revolution, are composed in a distinct Egyptian
dialect. Because of the impossibility of rendering this distinction in the English translation, the
English reader loses one of al-Zayyat’s main contributions and arguments -- that the new nation
57
This is not to detract from the eloquent and sensitive translation done by Booth, who herself is aware of the
violences inherent in translation. Reflecting on another novel she translated, she writes, and what I see as apt to
translation in general, “ There’s the violence of silencing, familiar to colonized subjects (including the post/neo) as
one way in which the hegemony of European/American-led development, including globalized cultural
transmission, deters or defers communication among and within societies that are experiencing ever-broader class
divides, partly as a result of imposed economic development programs. Not to be regarded as comparable to
violence practiced now and in the past against bodies of flesh, this vio/silence within the marketing and circulation
of translations perhaps makes the crushing of flesh slightly less shocking to an audience through the particular ways
it facilitates (or doesn’t) transcultural fictional conversations from and with certain parts of the world.” Marilyn
Booth, “On Translation and Madness,” Translation Review, 65:1 (2003): 48.
105
is not only based on figuratively opening the door of the bourgeois household and the rejection
of hierarchical understanding of gender differences, but also necessitates the adoption of a new
egalitarian language, the language of the Egyptian masses. Al-Zayyat’s deployment of the
directness, vitality, and effervesence of dialect is strategic. That deployment of dialect is what
propels the novel forward is also part of al-Zayyat’s project in breaking from tradition, and
ushering a newness. Language becomes another stage on which she declares her revolution.
Al-Zayyat’s choice in using the Egyptian dialect re-opened the door to heated debates.
Throughout the history of the Arabic novel, there has been a debate between the traditionalists --
who call for preserving the purity of fusha, and for the need “to be eloquent, to use Arabic
correctly” by adhering completely to the formal elements of the language -- and the modernists,
who call for introducing ‘ammiyyah into literary texts.
58
Understanding the etymology of the
Arabic word for “literature” – adab – partially sheds light on the basis for this debate. Richard
Jacquemond elucidates the moral resonance of the term adab/ literature:
It should be borne in mind that in modern Arabic linguistic usage, as well as in classical,
the term adab as literature and adab as morality has a dual meaning, having both a moral
component, in the sense of “well-mannered,” or “polite,” and a cultural one having to do
with the body of written work as a whole. Indeed, it is by drawing on this long-standing
semantic link between adab as literature and adab as morality that censors of every type
have continued to criticize literary works up until today, putting those of which they
disapprove in the category of the “improper” or “unseemly” (qillat adab). At the same
time, the ancient idea of adab includes conformity to linguistic norms, such as those
governing purity and correctness, as well as aesthetic ones, such as the rules governing
the prosody of classical poetry.
59
In the Arabic version of The Open Door, inherent in al-Zayyat’s larger project of opening
the door to a new independent nation is a call for a revolution in language use while shirking and
eschewing the conformity that Jacqumond elaborates above. This is not only done in al-Zayyat’s
58
Roger Allen, The Arabic Novel, (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1982) 34.
59
Richard Jacquemond, Conscience of the Nation, (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2008) 9- 10.
106
use of ‘ammiyah but also within the narrative itself. When an officer visits the girls’ university to
enlist them to volunteer with the National Guard, the event is described as follows:
He [the officer] stepped forward into the aisle that divided the sections of seats, speaking
in an everyday, conversational manner – no formal oratory, no flowery expression. His
speech flowed from feelings unfamiliar to these young women, sentiments about the
value of women, the true equality being given to them for the first time, since they were
now being given the right to defend the nation. Tears stood in many eyes; others widened
in amazement, as if the door to a strange world had opened before them
60
The narrator’s emphasizes on “no formal expression” which is characteristic of fusha and
classical Arabic intimates that the new independent nation is called forth in a new language – one
that collapses the hierarchy between everyday speech and classical Arabic, as well as the
hierarchy of gender. Furthermore, the officer’s egalitarian speech is bolstered with his navigation
of the space -- a configuration central to al-Zayyat’s project. The officer’s movement through the
aisles breaks down the hierarchy between him and the students he addresses while his informal
speech mirrors his egalitarian ideologies. Thus, access to space, gender equality, and his unique
language use form a constellation of hope for a new, independent Egypt.
Al-Zayyat’s choice of form caused a great deal of controversy in the Egyptian literati at
the time it was published. The novel was nominated for a state prize, a nomination upheld by a
unanimous vote of the state-appointed committee. But the writer and literary arbiter ‘Abbas al-
‘Aqqad, in his capacity as a permanent member of the Higher Council on the Arts and Letters,
threatened to resign unless the prize was rescinded.
61
In addition to a monetary award, recipients
are awarded a translation contract and their novels are translated into English by the American
60
Al-Zayyat, The Open Door, 247.
61
For a detailed study of this controversy, see Samia Mehrez’s Egypt’s Cultural Wars (London: Routledge, 2008)
Also, for information about the Higher Council on the Arts and Letters and its relationship to the state please see
Jacquemond’s Conscience of the Nation (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2008).
107
University of Cairo (AUC) Press in Cairo, New York and London.
62
However, the likelihood
that al-Zayyat’s work would circulate among a non-Arabic readership caused much controversy.
Arabic literary scholar Samia Mehrez details what she calls “the yearly battles” of the Naguib
Mahfouz Award at the AUC.
63
During her long life, al-Zayyat never accepted invitations to the
AUC because of its association with the west. Thus, when she was decorated posthumously,
much debate again ensued among the Egyptian literati. Mehrez details how the campaign against
the award was launched by Sayyid al-Bahrawi, Professor of Arabic literature at Cairo University,
and distinguished literary critic, himself both a leftist and activist and a close lifetime friend of
the late al-Zayyat. Al-Bahrawi declared that he personally believed that had al-Zayyat been
awarded the prize during her lifetime she would have refused it. He argued that the name of the
American University in Cairo that is attached to the annual award smeared the award, the Arab
novel and Arabic literature in general given, as he claimed, the institution’s “political agenda and
its well known intelligence role” in Egypt and “its antagonistic position toward Arab national
culture.”
64
Al- Bahrawi felt it his duty to stop the attempt to deform the values that al-Zayyat
and her works represented and to resist transforming her into a symbol of values adverse to her
own.
Despite al-Bahrawi’s protest, al-Zayyat did win the award and the novel was translated
into English by the AUC press in 2000. Herein lies the ambivalence inherent in global circulation
62
Recent winners include “The Revolutionary Literary Creativity of the Egyptian People (2011). For more
information, see http://www.aucpress.com/t-nmmdescription.aspx?template=template_naguibmahfouz
63
It is important to note that the establishment of the award in 1996 dovetailed with anti-American sentiments that
were accentuated by the American-led war against Iraq and the US’s unwavering support of Israel.
64
Mehrez 46-47.
Marilyn Booth in her article “On Translation and Madness” cites how, Somaya Ramadan, author of Leaves of
Narcissus was accused of being elitist and westward–gazing after her first novel won the Naguib Mahfouz prize of
the American University in Cairo Press. Booth analyzes, “that it was an ironic, prescient example of that too-
familiar conflation of female author an female author’s literary persona”(48).
108
of the publishing market. For it is thanks to this that the novel has a wider readership, since it is
no longer printed in the Arab world and only circulates in the English translation.
This tension
between the nationalistic motivations in the novel and its now transnational distribution thwarts
neat categorization. Thus, the spatial configurations – inside and outside the nation – also apply
to the social life of the text, not just on the plot level. Arab literary translator and scholar,
Marilyn Booth’s question about the violence enacted not only on the level of language but on the
level of dissemination and reception, remains important. Although writing about her translating
of another Egyptian woman’s text Booth ruminates, “If processes of translation, especially into
languages of colonial powers, necessarily entail degrees of violence, as one vocal strand of
thinking in translation studies now has it what of violence that might be entailed in reception,
and not only in the translator’s and publisher’s inevitable construction of hoped-for audiences?”
Faten Hamama as Layla
The cultural weight of The Open Door continues to resonate in Egyptians’ imaginary. It
has transcended the confines of the nation, language and dialect, and the familial home. The
metaphor of opening the door to a new political system, rejecting a hierarchical demarcation
mired in colonial ideology (or any hegemonic order, for that matter) has reached larger
audiences. Layla has come to be a figure under which women in the Arab world – not just Egypt
– have rallied. Her influence has transcended genres. In 2006, a blog named Kolena Layla (“We
are all Layla”) composed in English, French and Arabic, was established as a forum for Arab
women to “raise awareness and discuss the concerns of women in Arab societies.” Also, on
August 8th, 2015, on what would have been Latifa al-Zayyat’s 92
nd
birthday, Google users
across the Arab region were greeted with a doodle of al-Zayyat (holding a paper on which is
written the word “Layla”).
109
These contemporary echoes accord with the weight of the novel at the time of its
circulation. In 1963, the novel was made into a film by the same title directed by Henri Barakat
starring the Egyptian actress Faten Hamama.
65
Hamama’s relationship to the precarity of the
politics of her time mirrors that of al-Zayyat. Complaining of Egypt’s tense political climate in
the post-revolution era, Hamama lived in Paris, London and Lebanon in the late 1960s, despite
President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s invitation to return and his characterization of her as “a national
treasure.”
66
Although the film -- considered “one of the great classics of Hamama’s career” (she
occupies the top bill
67
) – is mostly faithful to the novel, the nationalist overtures are even more
explicit. Similar to the novel, the journey to independence is metaphorized architecturally. A
dramatic scene of Layla’s political consciousness begins the film. Set in the school yard of her
all girl school, Layla interrupts the principal’s exhortation of the division in sexes -- “The
woman’s place is in the home and the struggle is for the men”, the meek principal informs her
pupils -- and boldly takes the speaker from the principal’s hand and delivers a political message.
Passionately chanting in the loud speaker, Layla conveys to her fellow classmates a message of
equality, arguing that just as colonialism does not distinguish between the sexes in its
subjugation, the new free nation will not distinguish between the sexes in procuring their equal
rights. She ends her exhortation exclaiming, “Let’s open all the doors.” This is met with raucous
65
Hamama, known as the “Lady of the Arabic Screen” starred in nearly a hundred films and remains an idolized
national figure, in Egypt and across the Arab world. Historian Paul Sedra compares her to Grace Kelly, Natalie
Wood and Elizabeth Taylor. (http://www.madamasr.com/opinion/culture/faten-hamama-and-egyptian-difference-
film)
66
Compared to her American counterparts who shared the bill with male co-stars, Hamama dominated the screen in
her roles. She did not have to share the top of a bill. The “Egyptian difference” -- the difference between Hollywood
and the Hollywood on the Nile is the dominant role of women in 1950s and 1960s Egyptian cinema. Sam Roberts,
"Faten Hamama, 83, Egyptian Film Star." New York Times 23 Jan. 2015: B10(L).Academic OneFile. Web. 10 Mar.
2015.
67
Sedra
110
applause from her classmates. Layla then is carried on the shoulders of her classmates, chanting,
“Long live a free Egypt.”
68
Interestingly, the film inverses the time lag that the book enacts
between the sexes, that which I began this article with “even the women came out of their
houses” – where Mahmoud joins the resistance first, and then inspires Layla. In the film version,
it is Layla who joins the demonstration in the street before her brother.
This free maneuvering in a public space is sharpened in contrast to the way that Layla’s
room is filmed in the next scene. Upon her return home, faithful to the characterization of
Layla’s father in the novel as a violent man wanting to lock his children in the house and
resistant to political struggle, her father beats her and she locks herself in her room. When
Mahmoud finally convinces her to open the door to her room, their conversation regarding the
oppressive position that women occupy is heightened by the mis-en-scene. What is most striking
is the wallpaper. Compared to the scenes not only in the demonstrations but also in the
apartment, Layla’s room is bathed in darkness, with the ornately flowered wallpaper
overpowering the shot, visually expressing the gendered claustrophobia under which she suffers.
The film maintains allegiance to the novel until the end, where the plot diverges yet
remains faithful to the overall politics of the novel -- mainly the Marxist overtures of the
collective forming a whole, serving as an alternative family structure to the multi-generational
nuclear family. The movement and rushing, reminiscent of the imagery of the spring deployed in
the novel to conceptualize the revolution, in opposition to the stagnation and oppression of the
household, is made most explicit at the film’s final scene, which does not appear in the novel.
Exasperated with the air raids in Cairo, Ramzi and Layla’s family decide to escape to the town of
Fayyum for peace. In the train station, a dejected Layla wanders the corridors of the station
crowded with marching soldiers on the way to Port Said, among whom is Husayn. The train to
68
Al-bab Al. Maftooh. حﻮﺘﻔﻤﻟا بﺎﺒﻟا ﻢﻠﯿﻓ . YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afNen5YAOaM)
111
Fayyum has been delayed. Silent long shots of wounded people interjected with a close up of
Hamama’s pained face accompanies Husayn’s voiceover urging her to let go and get lost in the
people in order to free herself. After Professor Ramzi asks her to join him and her parents in the
waiting room at the train station, her internal turmoils are articulated through the metaphor of the
door: “Life for you is a closed door on your selfishness. For me, life is a door open to the future.”
This thought becomes the impetus to dramatically return her engagement ring to Ramzi. She then
begins walking, headstrong and determined, alongside the train, while her parents implore her to
stay. She insists on going to Port Said. She begins to run as the train begins to move. Husayn,
who had been on the train, notices her among the crowds. Once Layla catches sight of him, she
accelerates her speed, with a smile on her face, trying to catch the train and join him. In keeping
with the Marxist ideologies of the novel, a long shot of a close-up of disembodied hands
stretched out, urging to help her get on the train, embodying the masses supporting not only her
union with Mahmud but also her joining of the resistance in Port Said. The film ends with her
reunited with Husayn on a crowded car train on the way to Port Said.
The ending in the train station maintains a faithful expression of the spatial metaphors
that drive the project of the novel. Both the novel and the film narrate Layla’s successful opening
of the door to a new future of Egypt for Layla alongside Husayn. Echoing the chorus describing
the demonstration detailed in the introduction of this chapter, she has left her parents’ house and
heralds the beginning of a new era outside of the confines of the old nation and the old
household.
Between Two Houses: The thirty- four years between The Open Door and The
Owner of the House
The Open Door heralds several beginnings – the beginning of the battle for the Suez
Canal, as well as the beginning of Layla and Husayn’s egalitarian, politically motivated
112
relationship. With the privilege of historical hindsight, we have knowledge of what transpires.
The success of the Battle of the Suez Canal brought Egypt’s full independence from British
colonialism; Gamal Abd el-Nasser became the country’s first president and national hero. He
engendered a euphoria up-to-then unprecedented in Egypt. But, this euphoria was short-lived.
With the defeat of the 1967 War came the loss of hope and rampant disillusionment with the
Egyptian government. This sense of disillusionment affected Al-Zayyat’s relationship to writing.
Her loss of hope in the efficacy of the government was directly linked to her alienation from the
masses. In an interview al-Zayyat describes how a novel like The Open Door, considering all the
economic, political and social changes that had taken place since 1967, has become an
impossibility:
the outlook has become more complex; roads to salvations are blocked; the common
ground of shared values seems to break down into multiple different sets of values
according to the varied social strata; the common sensibility and its language is no more;
people lacking national unity are divided and subdivided until each is turned into an
insular island; all these changes resulted in marginalizing the sense of belonging and
national struggle.
69
Continuing to rely on topographic tropes to articulate her political activism, al-Zayyat describes
the waves of the masses in The Open Door as being replaced by isolated people as “insular
island.” Free flowing springs signifying the revolutionary fervor, and the thrust to change, give
way to “blocked roads” – the bureaucracy, censorship laws, and surveillance emblematic of
Nasser and Sadat’s regime. The amorphous masses and the waves of the revolution, images that
figure so prominently in The Open Door are absent, signaling the loss of hope in change and the
extent of her disillusionment. The insularity that replaces the masses reflects the political
decisions that unfolded with Sadat, Nasser’s successor, who replaced state socialism with the
open door policy, called infitah, or openness. Ironically, the very image that al-Zayyat deploys to
69
Ferial J. Ghazoul and Barbara Harlow, eds. The View From Within: Writers and Critics on Contemporary Arabic
Literature, (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1994) 256.
113
imagine an Egypt free of colonial rule in The Open Door, is deployed for a very different
political agenda in Sadat’s era. The change that Layla imagines will occur on the other side of
the door she opened here, instead, is turned on its head and is made to signify opening the door
of the nation to foreign investors, privations, corruption and poverty. As a result, al-Zayyat
stopped writing for a period of time, admitting to being unable to write anything hopeful. She
shares in The Search,
Words became emptied of their meanings, all words, and wrapped in the cloak of history
and economics I seek in facts shelter from words, all words, head bowed and eyes cast
down for fear of meeting other people’s eyes. I am the soldier, martyred, not knowing
from where the betrayal came; I am the soldier coming back naked in the fevered heat of
the sun across the Sinai desert; I am the one who arouses sorrow; I am the object of
ridicule and every joke that people tell hurts like an arrow in my heart. O my God, how
many arrows you have showered upon me as I dragged on in my failure, my rancor, and
my desire for revenge as words lost their meanings, all words.
70
Just as Layla’s actions and choices doubled as Egypt’s trajectory to independence, al-Zayyat here
bears responsibility by identifying with the ’67 defeat personally: “This defeat happened to me
on a personal level and it is the hardest thing that has happened to me.”
71
The open door that Layla and Husayn embody as the vision of the new Egypt is turned on
its head in The Owner of the House. Published in 1995, the novel exposes the oppression of
Sadat’s presidency during which time the euphoria of post-independence Egypt is transformed
into isolation, paranoia and disillusionment. As the title of the novel suggests, al-Zayyat’s vision
of Egyptian women’s position in the nation is articulated through her relationship to a house.
Also, the encoding of the politics of the time in the dynamics of a conjugal relationship carries
through in The Owner of the House. Told from the point of view of Samia, we learn that her
husband Mohammed has just escaped from being imprisoned for an unnamed crime, and is
70
Al-Zayyat, The Search, 52.
71
Ibid., 66.
These exact lines appear in The Search, where an excerpt from an unfinished novel entitled “The journey” appears.
114
reunited with her after over a year’s absence. They are fugitives in a house that Rafik,
Mohammed’s friend, finds where a nameless, disembodied, omnipresent landlord watches over
them. After an unknown amount of time elapses (no dates mark the novel, in contrast to al-
Zayyat’s earlier text), unable to bear the instability of the situation, and after a tense argument
with Rafik and her husband, Samia decides to abandon them and return to her mother’s house.
Halfway through her train journey home to her mother, obsessed with the owner of the house,
she returns to the house, and becomes involved in a physical fight with the owner, while
Mohammed and Rafik only appear in photographs on the front page of the newspaper.
This short novella is markedly different from al-Zayyat’s first text. The image of the
happy couple facing the new nation hand in hand is replaced and distorted. She also occupies an
ambivalent position as a wife, embodied in the presence of Rafik, who helped her husband
escape. She has to “play a game”, where she is Rafik’s wife, and they have to sneak Mohammed
into the house in the middle of a freezing night, to avoid the watchful eye of the nameless owner
of the house. There are also moments of tension where she feels as if Rafik and Mohammed are
conspiring against her. The honesty and “current” between the lovers who embody the vigor and
hope for the revolution are here replaced with deception, paranoia, schisms and silences. The
happy couple in The Open Door is now replaced by a triad who are shrouded in mystery and
whose motivations and motives are suspicious and unclear. As opposed to marriage being a
figure of the forward movement and thrust and pulse of the revolution in The Open Door, here it
becomes a site of loss, of isolation, with no hope for the future. The ever-present waves of
masses urging Layla to join them, and serving as the antithesis to her parents’ confining, stifling
household disappear in this last novel. The presentness, the thrust forward in political fervor, in
The Open Door, are replaced with an interiority and an uncertainty, filled with Samia’s neurosis
115
and incessant self-questioning. The narrative is unanchored in time and space. The realism of
The Open Door is dropped and in its place is a psychological novel. Samia is mired in isolation,
loneliness, almost removed from history. The clear demarcations between the inside and outside
of the house – central in the earlier novel -- are now suspended. Everything is a circle. Here,
there is no context, no articulated historical setting, and the novel’s plot and the characters’
motivations – so transparent in The Open Door -- are here opaque. The dialogue which
characterizes The Open Door is replaced with Samiya’s internal monologue, and paranoia. The
firm, intentional setting of the first text -- in Cairo on Ya’qub Street in the neighborhood of
Sayyida Zaynab, and the descriptions of the demonstrations taking place in Ismaillyya Square --
and time (the years between 1946—1956) is here replaced with an unknown neighborhood, at an
unknown time. The characters have no last names; relationality and connection, once enjoyed, is
now gone. The linear narrative that culminates with the heroine successfully opening the
figurative door onto a new hopeful world is replaced with flashbacks, circling and confusion.
The stability of time is also blurred. There is a disturbance of the linear marching forward of
time. She questions whether the events that transpire have already occurred. The difference
between the present and the past is flattened. Time seems to stagnate and to circulate.
For example, in one scene, the threesome is in danger of being arrested by the police.
After the police leave and do not arrest them, the narrator writes, “It occurred to Samia as the
police car pulled away that she had been through all this before, in every detail – but where, and
when? She did not know, but she did know she had lived through it before and that was split, a
human being drained of everything and a monster with no roots and no power to move.”
72
72
Al-Zayyat, The Owner of the House, 31.
116
The Old House
Al-Zayyat again relies on an architectural motif to narrate the trajectory of Samia’s life
which doubles as Egypt’s political transformation. Samia’s life can be mapped architecturally
through her move away from the old house, her marriage (the details of which we only
understand in flashbacks), and her temporary sojourn in the house with the escaped Mohamed,
and Rafik. Samia recalls that her mother “disapproved of the long road she had followed in order
to go to university in Cairo and marry a man of her own choosing, independently of the
family.”
73
This, in many ways, is the continuation of Layla’s story, who, too, like al-Zayyat and
Samia, went to Cairo University and married a man of her choosing.
Whereas the parents’ household and the outside space function dichotomously in The
Open Door, conversely, in The Owner of the House, Samia has an ambivalent relationship to the
old house – at times longing for its safety, yet describing it as a place where women are always
mourning, for reasons unknown to the reader.
74
Like Layla’s parents’ house, Samia’s mother’s
house is described as a place of continuity, unaffected by transformations occurring in the
outside world. However, unlike Layla, Samia longs for
its endless safety, for the monotony which nothing breaks and which the world outside
hardly touches, for the silence which lies, still and quiet, over the old house, for the sound
of footsteps which nobody hears passing, which cling to the walls as if they had not
73
Ibid., 25.
74
Women in endless mourning appear in her autobiography The Search where she describes her extended family
when they are to leave their old house in Damietta for Mansoura,
“The whole family was gathered, my father’s family and my mother’s family, and the women of both
families were sobbing. My mother was crying, her mother and her aunt were crying, so was my father’s
mother, and the women who wept wore somber clothes. In our little town, where families are related by
marriage and the family extends endlessly, a great deal of mourning is worn, for this person or that, off and
on, over and over again, until one would think that the women of our town were born in mourning garb
(30).”
Even in mourning there is a sense of community and relationality. Although al-Zayyat insists that her work is not
autobiographical, these echoes are undeniable.
117
passed at all…. Where one no longer needs to think, or make arrangement, or wait for
anything…
75
For Samia, the old house is at once a place of stasis, stability, changelessness, monotony,
removal from the outside world, yet there is also a specter of death, silence and eeriness –
“footsteps which nobody hears passing.” There is an oppressive sense of passivity, and
complacency – “one no longer needs to think, or make arrangement, or wait for anything.”
Opacity and oppression do not hinder Samiya from longing for it. Furthermore, the old house is
associated with the figure of the mother. Samia recounts, “I do not know, in my mother’s lap I
did not see and I did not know, in the darkness of the well a person no longer needs to see and
know.”
76
When she is exasperated and desperate with her seemingly unending purgatory in the
unknown house with her husband and Rafik, she repeats a plea to her mother who isn’t there,
echoing a refrain that appears throughout the novella, “Hide me, mother, hide me, I have given
up trying.”
77
For Samia, the mother and the old house provide solace, but also a sense of regression to
a previous stage -- of stasis, inactivity, and complacency – which provide comfort in contrast to
the situation she is in. The impossible return to the mother’s lap symbolizes not only a childhood
phase that cannot be relived, but also insinuates a political activism in an embryonic stage. The
old house here is the old political regime, a childhood phase, associated with darkness. She
pleads,
Hide me, mother, hide me, I am ashes, I am nothing, I am a monster with four eyes. In
darkness drape me, with slumber in oblivion shroud me, I have put an end to my
questions, it’s no use, no use…. I will never raise my voice, with cork I will line my
75
Al-Zayyat, The Owner of the House, 26.
76
Ibid., 124.
77
Ibid., 111, 119, 120.
118
shoes and pass along the winding corridors of the old house as if I were not really there,
the corridors will not echo to my footfall.
78
Here, Samia implores her mother to surround her in silence, in isolation, and promises to “never
raise[her] voice”. This passage, among many, leaves the reader questioning what she will not
raise her voice against, what questions will she no longer ask, and why she insists on her
disappearance in the images invoked by the ashes and nothingness and distortion of her body in
the shape of a monster. al-Zayyat saw her writing as reflecting the time in which she was writing,
and that it should give hope. Here she has a message of no hope, and of defeat for Samia
promises to no longer question the status quo, no longer be an audible critique of the political
regime.
An In-Between House
This desire for silence and disappearance is accentuated by the ubiquity of the nameless
owner of the house. All of the action takes place in hiding in the in-between house, as the trio
anxiously anticipate the police arresting them, under the watchful eye of the nameless owner of
the house. The owner of the house, disembodied, reminiscent of Foucault panoptican, is always
there and they always live in fear of him. He admits to the three of them, “I see you. All day and
all night. I see you.”
79
They hear his knock and his footsteps, yet it is never clear whether it was
only in their imagination or not. The narrator details Samia’s first encounter with the landlord,
She looked at the landlord in surprise. There was something strange about this man. This
old man? Or was he young? His rich, deep voice did not fit with his short, frail body.
Who and what did he remind her of? Had she met him before, not just once but many
times? There was something about the whole place.
80
78
Ibid., 120.
These exact lines appear in The Search, where there’s an excerpt from an unfinished novel entitled “The journey”
1962. The passage ends with, “They will never know that in the old house died her youth and her middle age…”
(65)
79
Ibid., 92.
80
Ibid., 38.
119
His familiarity reveals the police state that lived under, that he could be anybody, and everybody.
Confronting him, she wonders, exposing the extent of her paranoia, “if the obscurity around the
landlord was in her imagination… [she wondered whether] she had come to accomplish required
her to actually kill him, or to kill him inside herself?”
81
The flattening of the image and the
reality, of her interiority and her exteriority suggest that her senses betray her. There is
discontinuity, and dissonance between what she sees and what is real.
The Owner of the House is a document on the failed socialist policies of the Egyptian
government, its inability to either promote social equality or save the nation from its slide into
economic decline. Al-Zayyat treats similar motifs in both novels. Both grapple with the
implications of the opening of Egypt’s metaphorical doors. Whereas the inside of the house in
The Open Door perpetuates colonial economic inequality, and the outside represents hope,
revolution and mutual love, in The Owner of the House, the dichotomies shatter and give way to
ambiguities, imprecision, and instability. The realism of The Open Door is replaced with the
internal monologue, stream of consciousness of a woman under surveillance. It is the inside of
the house that is the police state and outside is unknown. No hope remains.
Conclusion
Reading fiction that begin and end al-Zayyat’s literary career bears witness to the
responsibiliy of writers to navigate and steer the politics of their time. She recounts in The
Search, “A few days after the [ 1967 ] defeat, the Fiction Committee at the High Council for
Culture held its meeting, which was attended, quite usually by about fifty eminent writers. I said:
“Every one of us is responsible for this defeat. If we said no to wrong whenever it was done, we
81
Ibid., 132 -133.
120
would not be faced with defeat now.”
82
In studying the metaphor of the home as nation, this
chapter dislodges the binary logic that separates the private and public spheres, revalues and
reorients women’s relationship to their household and places the site of political activism in
unlikely locations. Instead of the house being a stagnant symbol, Al-Zayyat’s work invites a
dynamism to women’s writing history. In one, the household represents the colonial regime; in
the other, it stands for the oppressive state regime. In both, the protagonist escapes it – the first,
with the hope of forming a nationalism, relational, communist, feminist vision of the future;
while, in the other, escaping is futile because she has internalized all that it represents
(surveillance, lost love, paranoia, futility, hopelessness, failed nationalism). In deploying the
trope of the household to analyze two different historical moments, al-Zayyat divorces women
from their association with tradition and backwardness and makes the home a fertile platform
from which to understand women’s political activism.
82
Ibid., 53.
121
CHAPTER THREE:
RESISTANCE IN AHDAF SOUEIF’S IN THE EYE OF THE SUN: LAUGHTER,
KINSHIP AND UNTRANSLATABILITY
[T]his particular Colonel never did carry out a coup, so evidently – with or without a map – his
meetings came to nothing. Which, Asya would come to believe, is what most meetings of this
nature (and, indeed, of most other natures too, probably) come to in the end. For even this, her
less-than-microscopic path of history, is more or less a record of meetings, which, in the end,
came to nothing; the meetings of Mukhtar al-Ulama and his ‘National Democratic League’, of
Hamid Mursi and ‘Bread and Freedom’ and – a generation later and partaking of the general
decline – the meetings, under the black and white Che poster of Muhsin Nur-el-Din and his
friends: events resulting in nothing except a few years in jail, a few buckets of cold water in your
face if you were lucky, bare wires between your toes if you weren’t.
-- Ahdaf Soueif, In the Eye of the Sun, (1991)
When Deena visits her sister Asya in the North of England, where Asya is completing her PhD in
linguistics, Deena updates her sister about the underground political activism unfolding in Egypt
since Asya’s departure. It is July 1976 and Egypt’s president, Anwar Sadat, has been
transforming Egypt economically, politically and socially. Deena discusses her leftist love
interest, Muhsin Nur-el-Din’s, political activism in the university. Questioning the subversive
potential in his activities, Asya asks whether Muhsin and his colleagues collectively comprise an
“organization” or whether they are just “a group of friends who talk politics.”
1
Deena answers, “
‘Well, what I see is a group of friends. But they say there are more of them and that they’re not
just university people but that they have connections in factories and so on – ’ ”
2
Asya shares
her opinion about her past involvement in the university’s committees and organizations, “ ‘I just
got tired of it really quickly. Huge discussions and pointless debates and people showing off. I
1
Ahdaf Soueif, In the Eye of the Sun, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993) 471.
2
Ibid.
122
just haven’t –’ ” Deena agrees with her sister, “ ‘I know what you mean. It’s exactly right. It’s a
waste of energy.’ ”
3
I begin this chapter with the description of the above scene to showcase the critique that
Asya and her sister (along with the other women in the al-Ulama family)
4
launch against men’s
attempts at protesting against the organizing powers – in this case Anwar Sadat’s neoliberal
policies. The sisters’ agreeing that “political debates” are a “waste of energy” exposes their
doubts regarding political discussions and debates translating into action or into effectively
combatting structures of power. Men’s organizations and networks within the university and the
factories as viable sites of political activism are questioned, or, as a teenage Asya explains more
crudely quoted in the epigraph of this chapter, amount to “nothing.”
5
It is against these critiques
that the novel presents countering sites of political activism within women’s spheres. This
chapter examines women’s gatherings – in the outskirts of the city, in villages outside of Cairo,
and in a graveyard. Within these peripheral sites, women articulate their resistance through
affective responses to national demands post the 1967 defeat in the Six-Day War, and through
alternative kinship structures (both biological and non-biological) which foster care-taking rituals
that combat the economic hardships of Anwar Sadat’s open-door economic policy in the 1970s.
Furthermore, in order to understand the politics of resistance within the novel, I contend we must
explore Soueif’s unique language choice. Long passages of dialogue and detailed descriptions of
the quotidian are interlaced with popular songs in various languages, national anthems, quotes
3
Ibid., 472.
4
When describing one of Deena’s friends – “the one who believes in ‘the inevitability of the armed struggle’ ” –
Lateefa al-Ulama remarks, “ ‘It’s such a waste of time.’ … ‘All that sitting around and talking that they do’ ”
(Soueif 1992, 687). She echoes this critique of the men being too idealistic and ultimately useless when she
describes to Asya Mukhtar’s (her husband and Asya’s father) reaction to her decision to go to the University of
Kuwait (Soueif 730).
5
Ibid., 76.
123
and references from the English canon. Composed in English, with no Arabic original, the novel
weaves several Englishes into its narrative: the seamless clipped English of international
newspapers; a polished Queen’s English and British slang, punctuated by allusions to the canon
of English literature, which structure the novel’s paratext; as well as a foreignized English which
includes literal translations of a distinct Upper Egyptian, classed dialect; and calques of Egyptian
idioms, expressions and proverbs. I contend that Soueif’s strategy of domesticating and
foreignizing translations domesticates Egyptian post-independence, post-colonial political
history within the English literary canon and is a form of interpellation, a hailing of an
Anglophone audience to witness yet not comprehend the effects of Egypt’s changing national
fabric. This is accomplished by her deployment of a translated Egyptian dialect, a foreignizing
strategy that ensures a level of affective interaction in her text to which a non-Egyptian
readership is not privy. Given the political context in which the novel is set, this shifting between
linguistic strategies along with her representations of alternative sites of political resistance
present a non-totalizing story of national belonging, and contest the generalizing,
sensationalizing rhetoric associated with the genre of Arab women writers.
6
Egyptian History in the English Literary Canon
In the Eye of the Sun spans the years 1967 to 1980, the time in which Egypt sees the defeat of
the Six-Day War, the death of Gamal ‘Abd el-Nasser, Anwar Sadat’s presidency, and the
subsequent victory in the 1973 war. During the thirteen years, Egypt undergoes a dramatic
political shift: the centralized state socialism of the ‘Abd el-Nasser era is dismantled in favor of
6
There has been a discussion of these limiting frames of analysis by Arabic literary scholars and feminist
anthropologists. See, for example, Lila Abu-Lughod.Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?; Amal Amireh and
Lisa Majaj, Going Global: The Translational Reception of Third World Women Writers; Marilyn Booth, “ ‘The
Muslim Woman’ as Celebrity Author and the Politics of Translating Arabic: Girls of Riyadh Go on the Road.”;
Mohja Kahf, “Packaging ‘Huda’: Sha’rawi’s Memoirs in the United States Reception Environment.”; Western
Representations of the Muslim Woman: From Termagant to Odalisque.
124
Sadat’s neoliberal program of economic development that, in line with policies formulated by the
International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, advocated the opening of local markets to
foreign investment, privatization, structural adjustment and retreat from the state provision of
social services. The novel details the effects of these economic decisions: increased poverty,
depletion of social services and high inflation.
7
These political events are intertwined with the
intimate details of the al-Ulama family: the coming-of-age of Asya, from her young student life
in Cairo, to her courtship, wedding, and, ultimately, failed marriage to Saif Madi, to her sexual
fantasies, love affairs, world travels and study in northern England to complete her PhD in
linguistics.
The novel is preoccupied with the historical moment in which it is set, conveyed through the
narrative’s division. It is divided into ten chapters, each titled by the month and year. The
chapters are further partitioned into sections called “scenes,” each scene separated into
subheadings – some divided into times of day. Anxiety about the passing of time and the effects
of the political shifts begin the novel. Part I, dated 1979, sees Asya in England writing to her best
friend, Chrissie, apprehensive about the changed Egypt:
Is it really as different as I hear it is? Not everything can change though, can it? I mean, there
must be some things that stay as they are; after all, it’s only been five years, and while that’s
very long for you and me it isn’t long at all in the history of a country —
8
Here, Asya articulates one of the novel’s projects: to chronicle the effects of these shifts on the
daily lives of ordinary Egyptians. Notably, the reader is invited to understand these effects
7
Asya’s aunt, Tante Soraya, who is employed as a social worker spanning the years of Nasser’s presidency as well
as Sadat’s presidency, sheds light on the extremity of the economic conditions. The narrator writes about Soraya,
“she has worked all her life with the deprived, from ‘Abd el-Nasser’s ‘People’s Clubs’ to the ‘Productive Families’
to God know how many other schemes -- …-- and after thirty years of it to find that the misery and the squalor had
simply increased: that the poor were poorer and more numerous and had less hope – to find that after thirty years in
the service of the government you could actually afford less than you could when you started – to be called Director-
General and have to think about whether you could afford the new shoes your son was demanding— ” (747).
8
In the Eye of the Sun, 3; emphasis in the original.
125
through the frame of the English literary canon. The epigraph, signaling the lens with which to
proceed with the reading, is a quote from George Eliot’s Middlemarch:
… and we do not expect people to be moved by what is not unusual. That element of
tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse
emotion of mankind; … If we had a keen vision and feeling for all ordinary human life, it
would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of
that roar which lies on the other side of silence.
Here, Soueif domesticates the Egyptian narrative into the English literary canon. In the sense of
the word to domesticate as “to live familiarly or at home (with); to take up one’s adobe” (OED),
the Egyptian narrative is “made at home” in the English literary canon. However, this
domestication has a different effect from that which translation theorist Lawrence Venuti
cautions against. He writes that domesticating strategies implicate the translation in ideologies
that arrange social differences – of class, gender and race -- in hierarchical relations.
9
However,
for Soueif, domesticating the text within the English literary canon collapses the power relations
between the once-colonizer and colonial subject, and adapts Middlemarch to accommodate the
Egyptian narrative. We are, thus, invited to understand the two texts as parallel texts. This is
bolstered by the fact that on several occasions within the novel, the narrator likens Asya to the
Victorian heroines she so admires.
10
Soueif entices the monolingual reader by promising access
to a story of a world attuned to “the roar” of grass growing and squirrel’s heart beating––a world
that is seen, and known but ignored, unheard or not understood. However, this access is never
fully realized for both the narrator and the reader. This perspective leads the reader into the
9
Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London: Routledge, 1995) 15-18.
10
Dissatisfied with the fact that her marriage has not been properly consummated, Asya ponders, “What is the
answer? Renunciation? A la Maggie Tulliver and Dorothea Brooke?” When she ultimately commits adultery with
Gerald Stone, she thinks to herself, “You’ve committed adultery, you’ve done it, you’ve joined Anna and Emma and
parted company for ever with Dorothea and Maggie.” In an interesting reversal of the gaze, she writes, “You know
what Dorothea would think? …. She would think these were the arguments of a whore… Dorothea was, after all,
Victorian – and you, what are you, a modern woman?” (Soueif 303, 540, 541)
126
beginning of this epic novel.
Laughter as political resistance
One of the novel’s concerns is to index women’s collective responses to the government’s
demands. A scene set on November 23, 1967, after the June ’67 defeat, details Asya and her
friends’ participation in the nation’s military training. The young women present themselves at
the Military Training Test, after completing a perfunctory two-week course, an obligation that all
Egyptian university students had to fulfill at the time. This comes in the aftermath of the period
of high nationalism after the Second World War when national identity and nationalist ideology
were the primary tools for countering colonialism. However, Asya and her international friends’
conduct during the final Military Training Test belies their political ambivalence. Asya, along
with Chrissie, whose Europeanized name is a result of her having spent the first five years of her
life in England, Mimi, who has a French mother and an Egyptian father and often interjects
French words in her speech, and Noora – all members of Egypt’s elite -- are depicted as aloof.
During the military exam, Noora looks “attentive but abstracted … oblivious of all around
her”;
11
Mimi “looks bored…examines her fingernails and wishes she were sitting in a
comfortable chair with a nice, hot, glass of tea.”
12
The scene culminates in Mimi’s interaction
with a young officer asking her to demonstrate what she has learned in her training. He asks her
to load her gun (called a Port-Said)
13
and fire. Hesitant, tentative and obviously untrained to
handle a gun, with the soldier’s pressure to fire, “Mimi averts her face, closes her eyes and
presses the trigger. A long burst of machine-gun fire follows and then she bends double over her
11
Soueif 82.
12
Ibid., 82-83.
13
Port Said is the harbor city north of the Suez Canal; symbolically, it figures highly in Egyptian nationalism so
Soueif’s representation of it as an impotent phallus speaks to the utter failure of the defeat
127
gun. Chrissie, Noora and Asya rush over and try to straighten her up but she is hysterical with
laughter.”
14
This image of the young women huddled around Mimi serves as a sharp contrast to the gun,
the military, and the demands to protect the nation. Also, the fact that the young women’s
Military Training Test takes place at the Sa’idiyya Secondary School for Boys further
underscores the young women’s peripheral position. Mimi’s affective response presents the
reader with a marked ambivalence. The laughter can be understood either as the desire to diffuse
the violent aggression of the loaded gun, or as an involuntary bodily release, or as an active
attempt to counter hostility through ridicule or mockery. It can also highlight the futility of trying
to arm the nation’s young women after the military had already proven itself unfit to protect its
borders. Or, it could be interpreted as a mocking of the government’s obligatory implementation
of a military training program intent on training unfit and uncommitted citizens. However, the
reader is barred from knowing. Thus, this reading of the laughter – compounded with the
suggestion of the gun as a phallic symbol representing an impotent, inadequate nation -- adds to
the humiliation of a nation that has already seen a laughable defeat.
In “An Inventory of Shimmers” Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg theorize that
“affect arises in the midst of in-between-ness: in the capacities to act and be acted upon. Affect is
persistent proof of a body’s never less than ongoing immersion in and among the world’s
obstinacies and rhythms, its refusals as much as its invitations.”
15
Laughter for Mimi gestures to
the ambivalence that emerges out of her physical presence and participation in the military
training but her apparent rejection of the exercise. Thus, this alinguistic expression of her bodily
14
Soueif 84.
15
Melissa Gregg and Gregory Siegworth, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, North
Carolina: Duke University Press, 2010).
128
experience becomes a means of resisting the nationalist demands while at the same time inviting
a women’s collective, embodied in her circle of friends. That is, it is her laughter that is the
impetus for her friends rushing to gather around her. I read this as a blurring of the nationalist
project. Seigworth and Gregg continue, “Because affect emerges out of muddy, unmediated
relatedness and not in some dialectical reconciliation of cleanly oppositional elements or primary
units, it makes easy compartmentalisms give way to thresholds and tensions, blends and blurs.”
16
Indeed, hearing the unlikely combination of the “long burst of machine gun-fire” and Mimi’s
“hysterical” laughter thwarts the girls’ comfortable compartmentalization into either trained
military citizen or ordinary civilian. Laughter, thus, becomes the affective expression of the
threshold that the group of girls embody – young women concerned with the country’s political
defeat yet unmotivated to participate in the military training, conscious of the changing political
terrain (as evidenced by the epigraph that introduces this article) yet unconvinced by men’s
attempts at effectively staging political resistance. The involuntary, spontaneous and eruptive
nature of Mimi’s laughter as well as the momentary gathering of women that it catalyzes are
rendered a powerful archive of resistance.
Women’s collective resistance to government policies is represented in another scene of
laughter that, again, takes place outside of the city, among village women, in 1980, at the time
when Egypt is governed by Anwar Sadat’s neoliberal economic policies. In part one of the novel,
set in 1979, Asya is selected to be one of the Western personnel -- because “she is meant to be
the expert at ‘communicating with Arabs’ ”
17
-- by the Citadel Publishing, Inc. a publishing
company, who recently started a Middle East Division, and who were seeking to expand their
16
Ibid., 4.
17
Soueif 24.
129
market to make educational pamphlets about family planning and hygiene accessible to women
in the Third World -- “from Chile to Afghanistan.”
18
With Sadat’s economic policy, the Citadel
Publishing, Inc. is brought in to implement the government’s family planning policy. Asya, thus,
is to act as a mediator between the publishing company and the women across Egypt’s villages.
Her job is to make the Egyptian Higher Council for Family Planning’s Policy clear: “A Small
Family is a Happy Family.”
19
In preparation for Asya’s presentation to the village women, she studies the publishing
company’s materials and attempts to translate them in a form that would be comprehensible to
them. In order to communicate their message, the publishing company deploys several
discourses: a religious discourse (Asya describes the page of quotes from the Quran and the
Traditions compiled by the publishing company’s religious advisor from the School of Oriental
and African Studies
20
) and several visual aids. She is asked to combine the two discourses in a
way that would be convincing to the village women. Her task is to write two texts: one for the
health workers, teachers, outreach workers and village leaders all over the world, who the
publishing company is trying to gain as consumers of their educational devices; the other text is
for the “target audience” – the men, women and children of the villagers of the Third World.
21
However, the publishing company’s research about their potential clients does not translate
across cultures. Asya imagines how farcical it would be to teach her village audience family
planning methods. She envisions herself speaking to them, urging the women to communicate
18
Ibid.,23.
19
Ibid.
20
Ibid., 21.
21
Ibid., 22.
130
with their husbands after dinner about possibly not having any more children. The narrator
describes: “Asya can see the man pausing in his search for the slippers and gaping at the wife
who has never before in his presence strung together a sentence one third the length of this one”
and realizes that, “You’ll just lose them if you kick off with something that they think you ought
to know is absurd….”
22
Here, she is aware that the very act of articulating a family planning
policy – in fact, communicating in words at all – would be “absurd” to the families in the
villages. The speech act, what rational thought privileges, and the only vehicle with which the
publishing company articulates its message is imagined as a subject of mockery. In Asya’s
mind, even the husband’s reaction is “gaping.” This image of the open mouth communicating
shock and absurdity without words – a visceral embodiment of resistance -- is a silent echo of
Mimi’s laughter in the novel’s earlier scene.
Because of the non-linear narrative of the novel, the results of Asya’s preparations for her
family planning presentations are suspended. After seven hundred pages, the novel then returns
to its starting point, where the scene is actualized in the epilogue. Although the epilogue and part
one are set in the same temporal moment, in the process of having gone back in time to narrate
the history of Egypt’s changing political terrain and Asya’s coming-of-age, the narrator shifts the
position from which to narrate. In attempting to detail the “road which lies on the other side of
silence,” promised in the epigraph, she comes to understand the extent of the changes brought on
by Egypt’s political shifts and her changed position vis-à-vis her country. This relationship is
articulated in the epilogue’s epigraph. Serving as a comment or a conclusion to the novel, a
quotation from Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Song of the Wise Children,” from which the title of the
novel is given, heads the epilogue. It reads
22
Ibid., 23.
131
We shall go back by the boltless doors,/ To the life unaltered our childhood knew -- …/
The wayside magic, the threshold spells,/Shall soon undo what the North has done--/
Because of the sights and the sounds and the smells/ That ran with our youth in the eye of
the sun.
Here, Asya’s nostalgia for her childhood in Nasser’s Egypt is likened to Kipling’s nostalgia for
his childhood in India. This linking with the British literary and colonial canon functions
differently from the epigraph that begins the novel. On the one hand, linking Asya, an Egyptian
returning to her native country, to Kipling, a colonizer returning to his once colony, subverts
their relationship of power, collapsing the difference between colonized and colonizer. The
Englishman’s nostalgia for his colony is reoriented and is made to encompass a nostalgia for a
pan-Arab nationalism.
23
On the other hand, Asya’s equating herself to Kipling marks the
position from which she is narrating this history, a position far removed from the world that “lies
on the other side of silence.” The country’s political shift from Nasser’s high nationalism and
state socialism to Sadat’s neoliberalism results in the narrator’s shift from having intimate
knowledge of Egypt to occupying the same position as the colonizer.
One reason for this is the increased (and increasing) gap between the socio-economic
classes, which accounts for Asya’s uneasy positioning in the new nation. The epilogue proceeds
to detail Asya’s return to Cairo after her long sojourn in England. What she laments to Chrissie
in her letter has come true: five years prove, indeed, to be a long time for the history of a
country. Asya’s laments register the quotidian – the disappearance of buildings, increased traffic,
the disappearance of a brand of pens or her favorite cookies she used to buy in her childhood.
This is the “not unusual” that we do not expect people to be moved by, “the roar which lies on
23
For a thorough reading of the image of the nation in the novel, see, Mrinalini Chakravorty, “To Undo What the
North Has Done: Fragments of a Nation and Arab Collectivism in the Fiction of Ahdaf Soueif,” Arab Women’s
Lives Retold: Exploring Identity through Writing, ed. Nawar al-Hassan Golley (New York: Syracuse University
Press, 2007) 129-154.
132
the other side of silence” according to the novel’s introductory epigraph.
The main text of the epilogue continues, detailing Asya’s attempt to teach the Family
Planning method articulated by the English publishing company. Asya is in a village near Sohag,
in Upper Egypt, about to introduce the Higher Council for Family Planning policy. After she
explains that “if there is anything in the teaching aids that is considered wrong or unseemly it
will make problems,” an unnamed woman answers, “God willing there will be nothing wrong.”
24
Another woman in another village responds, “Don’t worry, darling, your lesson is fine and
there’s no offence between women, let’s just laugh and untie our bonds for a while. What shall
we take with us from this life?”
25
While the women say this, the young children take out the
condoms and blow them into balloons, “turning them loose to zoom their way round the gallery
with loud farting noises.”
26
In another village, another woman’s reaction to Asya’s role as
mediator between two different cultures is spoken in distinct calques of the Egyptian vernacular,
“‘Sister, may God make you happy and grant you a bit of a child to fill the world around you.’”
27
Asya’s attempts at translating the publishing company’s plans fail. Instead, the women
suggest their own family planning methods, one antithetical to that of the publishing company.
The women’s reaction to the publishing company’s and the Egyptian Higher Council’s attempt at
regulating their bodies is, as in the case with Mimi during the military training, met with
laughter:
24
Soueif, In the Eye of the Sun, 756.
25
Ibid., 756 – 757.
26
Ibid., 757.
27
Ibid., 758.
133
They had laughed and commented and nudged each other through the demonstration, and
when she came to the barrier methods she had hesitated for a moment and then held up
the drawing of the erect penis with a blue condom being fitted over its head, and they’d
all fallen over laughing and pointing and covering up their faces.
28
Like Mimi’s laughter, this laughter is similarly ambiguous. On one level, it could be interpreted
as merely a reflection of the women’s embarrassment at discussing an intimate subject, a subject
they do not articulate in words, or, on another level, it could be read as a mocking of the
absurdity of the Western publishing enterprise’s attempts at regulating a society’s family
planning, a society’s whose ideas of family and reproduction differ from ideas of a nuclear
family. Or, it could be both. Importantly, the novel posits a mode of communication that bars a
global audience from precisely understanding Egyptian women’s motivation behind their
rejection of the government’s demands; what is clear, is that their laughter is an affective
judgment of the political demands – both national and neoliberal.
Alternative Kinship Structures
What underlines these interpretations of the women’s laughter is that, in the military
scene, the young women do not view their participation on the military front as a path towards
their liberation or their freedom. This disrupts the prevailing paradigm that links the nation’s
liberation with women’s liberation. In fact, liberation, narrowly understood as women’s
participation in the political arena, is not lacking. Similarly, in the village, the women combat the
demands of the Egyptian Higher Council put forth by the English publishing company not only
through laughing but also through articulating a different understanding of family and child
rearing. For them, the mandates of the family planning policies offer a very limited scope for
coping with the power structures that do nothing to abate economic and political oppression.
28
Ibid., 756.
134
When Tante Soraya, Asya’s aunt, comments on one of the village women’s several children --
“Have mercy on yourself, sister… What are you? A factory?”
29
-- the woman giggles and says
“like all the women in all the villages Asya has been to”, “What can we do? It’s God’s will.”
30
For her, carrying out God’s words is offering an alternative system to the economic demands.
The narrator explains the women of the village’s collective belief system:
They live and they die by God’s command…. The government picks up their men and
sends them to dig the Canal or die in the Yemen or the Sinai or sit all day holding
bayonets in armoured cars outside the university, and it is all by God’s command. They
have twelve children by God’s command. Some of the children die and others grow up
and work the fields or get an education or turn into robbers or God opens it in their faces
and they get work in Libya or Iraq or the Gulf – it is all by God’s command. And why
should it not be so? … it’s no good telling her about exponential growth, about the
economy of the country, about the per capita income – since when has a piastre of the per
capita income come her way? And what are the alternatives: to turn them into regiments
of blue-suited Maoists or into the degraded lowest rank of a capitalist society forever
hankering after refrigerators and washing-machines? No. Money and children are the
ornaments of this world; so, since they can’t have money, let them at least have
children.
31
Here, the village women’s relinquishing of their fate to God becomes an alternative to what the
narrator suggests as the two dichotomous prevailing systems – “the blue suited Maoists” or a
member of the “lowest rank of a capitalist society.” Their faith provides them solace in an
unjust, capitalistic world oblivious to their unique rituals and beliefs. Thus, for them, procreating
becomes the means by which to deal with the economic hardships. The insistence that children
are “God’s command” exposes their belief in an unregulated Islam, divorced from the
government and political party.
32
29
Ibid., 745.
30
Ibid.
31
Ibid., 759.
32
I see this view of Islam as starkly different from a more regulated Islam. Historian Scott Hibbard, Religious
Politics and Secular States: Egypt, India and the United States (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,
135
This vision of Islam contrasts with an interaction Asya has with one of her veiled
students at the University of Cairo. In the novel’s epilogue, Asya recalls meeting her students
after her return from completing her PhD in England. On the first day of class, she is shocked by
their veils, uncertain about how a student who chooses not to speak because she believes “the
voice of a woman is a ‘awra”
33
will participate in her seminar. Unsure of what to make of the
fact that the veiled student is learning English because she “want[s] to learn the language of my
enemy,”
34
Asya becomes self-conscious of her position and imagines that they see her as doing a
“sort of porno-spread up here on the podium for the world to see”
35
Critical scholarship on the novel has overlooked the distinction between the vision of
Islam espoused by the university students and the one understood in the villages – both for
different political purposes. Egyptian-American historian Leila Ahmed finds Soueif’s treatment
of the rise of Islamism insensitive to the class issues that motivate some students to wear the veil
and not others. Ahmed reads Asya’s reaction to her veiled student as shortsighted and lacking in
awareness of her own class biases. For Ahmed, Soueif’s critique of Islamism betrays her fidelity
to Western ideology. However, I would argue that Soueif’s concern with Islam and Islamism is
2010) 68-9 notes that under Sadat’s regime, the government sponsored millions of dollars for Islamic education and
promoted Islam through the media, funded the construction of thousands of mosques, all at the expense of the
political left. At the universities, leftist students were vocal in their protest against Sadat’s regime, and in order to
undermine these groups, the regime facilitated the growth of Islamist student organizations. Deena corroborates this
when she’s visiting Asya. She says, “ ‘Asya, do you know which is the fastest growing grouping in the university
now? The Islamic groups.’ ‘I thought they were outlawed?’ ‘Not any more. In fact Sadat’s encouraging them; he’s
using them – or thinks he is, anyways – to combat the left. It’s part of the rapprochement with the US. But of course
he isn’t making people join; they’re doing that on their own – and it’s really growing’ ”(Soueif 1992, 472).
33
Soueif, In the Eye of the Sun, 754.
‘Awra refers to parts of the body which should not be shown in public.
34
Ibid.
35
Ibid.
136
more nuanced. In fact, Asya discusses the presence of the veiled women with her sister, praising
them:
I mean, they’ve sorted out some kind of answer to what’s happening all around us – all
the manifestations of the West that they see here are no good for them, for the way of life
they want to hold on to, the values they feel comfortable with, even to their standard of
living. And their answer is genuine, it’s not imported or borrowed from anywhere –.
36
Although the veiled women’s presence make her uncomfortable -- as expressed in her reaction
above -- she credits the Islamists in the university for finding a viable means with which to
combat the “manifestations of the West.” Similarly, Asya acknowledges the village women for
espousing a system of belief that is incompatible to the one presented by the publishing
company. For the village women, this alternative economic structure contradicts a Western value
system that sees liberation as individuation.
37
This belief not only informs the decision-making
within a nuclear family, it also fosters a community where those who have provide for those who
have not.
A large family with multiple children as panacea to the economic pressures is bolstered
by a non-biological kinship structure. A scene at the end of the novel details the extended al-
Ulama family participating in the Muslim ritual of rahma. They visit their ancestors’ graves to
pay them tribute and distribute money and food to the poor families who tend to the graves. The
etymology of the word rahma resonates with this specific vision of Islam that the novel details.
The word is most often translated to the English words “mercy” and “compassion.” Rahma calls
on its followers to show their compassion “for the weaker section of society, which includes
36
Soueif, In the Eye of the Sun, 755.
37
Here I borrow from Suad Joseph formulations in Intimate Selving in Arab Families: Gender, Self and Identity
(Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press,1999). Joseph summarizes western psychodynamic as tending “to
presume that autonomy of the self entails the individuation of the self (the self separated from the other by clear and
firm boundaries). Such theorization has also presumed that individuation is necessary for agency. There has been a
tendency to naturalize the individuated self as the only possible repository of an agential self. Relationality, in these
frameworks, is not only an obstacle to maturity but destructive of agency (4).”
137
orphans, single mothers, poor, exploited and other socially, economically and politically
oppressed.” Rahma, in Arabic, is expressed in the love of a mother. This connection of rahma
and motherly love is unsurprising, for rahma is related to the Arabic word, rahm, which means
“uterus” “womb” and figuratively “family ties.” However, in this scene, by describing
caretaking outside of the biological family, biology becomes recalibrated to form an alternative
cite of political resistance.
At the gravesite, Asya gathers with her pregnant sister Deena, her aunts Soraya and Nadia
and her uncle Hamid to pay tribute to the dead and to listen to the recitations of the Qur’an.
Hamid instructs the children to form a line so that “Hajja Soraya doesn’t get cross with you”
38
His referring to Asya’s aunt Soroya as “Hajja” in front of the children gestures to a non-
biological kinship structure where she is interpolated as a devout, older Muslim woman, who has
already performed the holy pilgrimage and, therefore, commands respect. For the duration of this
interaction, fulfilling her role as a caring, older motherly figure, Soraya “calls them by their
names, asks how they are doing at school, puts a brand-new fifty-piastre note into each little fist
and then drops a handful of dried dates, an orange, and a three-finger bar of shoreik into the laps
of their galabiyyas …”
39
The evocation of Soraya as an elderly, motherly figure becomes the
basis on which the alternative economy is established. Away from the city, in the gravesite, they
establish an informal system of exchange that is unregulated and unmoderated by any governing
structures of power.
During the rahma ritual, Asya imagines her English lover’s, Gerald Stone, disapproval
and envisions herself saying to the children, ventriloquizing Stone: “Sorry, we think that the
38
Soueif, In the Eye of the Sun, 745.
39
Ibid.
138
‘mercy’ we bring here every season delays the process of your liberation; we’ve decided to speed
it up, to help you by increasing the pressure on you just that little bit more –’ ”
40
Here, Asya’s
words serve as a double judgment. First, her words are a commentary on the government’s
failures to provide for the poor and disenfranchised. She writes:
Of course it would be best if there were no children living among the tombs…. who
would look after the graves? A uniformed security guard employed by a company – an
‘open-door’ company to run the City of the Dead – well, they’ve given Transport to the
French, Sewage to the British, Telecommunications to the Germans and Defense to the
Americans; they could give the Cemeteries to the Swedes or the Japanese –
41
Here, she exposes the government’s outsourcing of various industries to foreign investors and
companies. This division and disintegration is sharply contrasted with the rahma ritual, rooted in
Muslim tradition, and the non-biological kinship structure evoked with Soraya acting as “Hajja.”
In addition, Asya’s sarcastic comment on Stone’s myopic definition of liberation critiques an
understanding of liberation as mandating independence and self-sufficiency. Thus, I read Soueif
descriptions of the rahma ritual as a viable platform from which to criticize the economic
policies instituted with the shift in political systems. Focusing solely on Islamism, as has been
done in the critical scholarship – a movement triggered by the political shifts in the nation’s
fabric – would sidestep Soueif’s other project, the one that sees a different element of Islam
serving as a balm for the pervasive economic oppression.
Set away from the city, in remote villages in Upper Egypt, the novel renders visible
collective responses to the exigencies of the government in the form of a large family.
42
Just as
40
Ibid., 746.
41
Ibid.
42
Asya describes another scene of resistance, informed by “God’s command”: “No wonder then that when their
patience occasionally comes to a temporary end and they gather, for example, around the police station, throw off
their outer garments and untie their kerchiefs and – with their hair spread out and their house-smocks revealed to
every passer-by – they raise their voices and wail through the night demanding the release of their menfolk who
have been rounded up in the coffee-houses a few hours earlier – no wonder that the bravest station commander will
139
the women do not fit into either one of the two dichotomous prevailing political systems––
neither “blue suited Maoists” nor members of the “lowest rank of a capitalist society”–– Soueif’s
linguistic intimacy marks her own intimate access to this alternative way of belonging to the
nation, beyond an essentialized national rhetoric and beyond ideology, without pandering to
state-sanctioned or state-controlled ways of being. On the other hand, she also marks her
distanced position -- referring to the women as “they”, “them” and insisting “let them at least
have children”
43
distinguishes and distances herself. She sets herself apart from them in language
and in class.
Resistance to Translation
In order to better understand the alternative sites of political resistance articulated in Soueif’s
novel and to situate her in the canon of Arab women political literature, we must be attentive to
the politics of circulation and translation of Arab women’s work. Translation theorist Lawrence
Venuti argues that “asymmetries, inequities, relations of domination and dependence exist in
every act of translating, of putting the translated in the service of the translating culture.”
44
Processes of translation assume added significance in the colonial and the neo-colonial setting
since the dominant power appropriates only texts that conform to the preexisting parameters of
its linguistic register. This relation of domination is set into crisis, however, when the author
herself acts as both author and translator, a technique Egyptian literary critique Wail Hassan
proposes as emblematic of what he coins translational literature: texts acting as “performances of
interlinguistic, cross-cultural communication, operating on several levels of mediation and
not come out to face them, that the machine-gun carrying solider will only shout at them from behind the walls, and
that, by dawn the men are free” (758-9). Asya asserts that the women stood in the face of the government. The
woman answers, “ ‘That was by God’s command’ ” (759).
43
emphasis added
44
Lawrence Venuti, The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference (London: Routledge, 1998) 4.
140
contestation.”
45
Using Soueif’s later work The Map of Love as an exemplary model, Hassan
theorizes that translational texts “resist the power differentials that influence the work of the
translator and reproduce stereotyped cultural identities.”
46
His successful reading of Soueif’s
most popular novel argues that translation is used as a metaphor for an anti-imperial and anti-
orientalist critique, spanning two time periods in Egyptian history: the British military
occupation of Egypt (1882—1956) and, later, United States foreign policy of the 1990s.
Similarly, Albakry and Hancock’s study of Soueif’s code-switching choices contends that
Soueif’s foreignizing strategies in The Map of Love “evoke[s] the other culture without
neutralizing its linguistic and cultural differentness in an ‘invisible’ monolingual style,”
47
resulting in the creation of a “new-English” that appropriately reflects the multiculturalism of her
characters.
48
Other scholars of Soueif’s work have focused on her articulation of a hybrid
identity,
49
her vision of Arab collectivism
50
and her treatment of what are perceived to be
“taboo” subjects – specifically, woman’s desire -- in the Arab world.
51
This scholarship has largely situated Soueif’s work in relation to western stereotypes of
the Arab world, uncovering through her unique use of language, and her complex, hybrid
45
Wail Hassan, “Agency and Translational Literature: Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love,” PMLA 121, no. 3 (2006)
755.
46
Ibid., 754.
47
Mohammed Albakry and Hunter Hancock, “Code Switching in Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love,” Language and
Literature 17, no. 3, (2008 231.
48
Ibid., 233.
49
Sabina D’Alessandro, The Politics of Representation in Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love (Bern, New York: Peter
Lang, 2011); Susan Muaddi Darraj, “Narrating England and Egypt: The Hybrid Fiction of Ahdaf Soueif,” Studies in
the Humanities 30, no. 1-2 (2003): 91-107.
50
Chakravorty.
51
Isam Shihada, “Politics of Desire in Ahdaf Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun,” Nebula 17, no. 1-2 2010).
141
character how she undoes these stereotypes. This is, of course, expected, since she writes in
English and travels extensively between Egypt and England. I would like to build on this
scholarship to uncover what the politics of translation specifically reveal about Egyptian national
belonging, beyond contesting east-west power relations. In In the Eye of the Sun, translation as a
practice does not only explicitly comment on the colonial moment. Instead, translation articulates
the fraught position of Asya’s desire to recuperate a moment of national belonging that will
never return. Using Hassan’s theorizations of translational literature, in what follows, I will
specifically focus on Soueif’s translation of the Egyptian dialect––the spoken language of the
everyday––in her English novel and propose that this foreignizing technique marks her
asymptotic relationship to a closed community of the nation.
As I have detailed in the introduction of this dissertation, scholars have rightly analyzed how
the transnational publishing apparatus colludes with literary market demands to ignore
contradictions and heterogeneity in works by and about Arab women.
52
It is against
collaborations with dominant representations of Arab women that I read Soueif’s text. The novel
is aware of how it could be interpreted by a Western audience. That is, Asya makes clear that she
recognizes the stereotypes that circulate about Arab women. When Deena is visiting Asya, they
are invited to an “Anglo-Arab” Friendship evening, where members of the Arab community in
England mingle with the English crowd. Deena is curious but Asya resists, explaining,
‘You know what that’s going to be like? Wispies exclaiming over ta’miyya and vineleaves
and groupies trying to belly-dance and kids on the rampage and wives huddled suspiciously
52
See Lila Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? (Cambridge, Massachusettes: Harvard University
Press, 2013), Amal Amireh, “Writing the Difference: Feminists’ Invention of the ‘Arab Woman,’” Interventions:
Feminist Dialogues on Third World Women’s Literature and Film, eds. B. Gosh and B. Bose (New York and
London: Garland Publishing, 1997), and Marilyn Booth, “ ‘ The Muslim Woman’ as Celebrity Author and the
Politics of Translating Arabic: Girls of Riyadh Go on the Road,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 6, no.3
2010).
142
together in a corner and a few radical Iraqis and Syrians shouting above the music in the
middle of the room –’
53
To Deena’s accusation of Asya being prejudiced against everyone who attends, Asya insists, “
‘I’m not. It’s a set piece: it can’t be any other way’ ”
54
Here, Asya strategically exposes the
elements the Arab world is reduced to in the Western imaginary -- staple foods, dance, gender
separation, and political radicalism – and alludes to their intractability. However, the project of
the novel is, in fact, to suggest another “way” to undo these stereotypes. That is, not only
through Soueif’s detailing of female collectives as viable political alternatives to government
policies within the novel, but also her narrative poetics, mainly her domesticating and
foreignizing translation strategies become narrative sites that deconstruct the Orientalist binaries
of self/other, center/periphery, us/them that are suggested by Asya’s commentary on the Anglo-
Arab Friendship and that are reproduced in the Western publishing market.
In order to understand Soueif’s narrative poetics as figuring a counter-narrative to the
homogenizing demands of the publishing market, we have to place In the Eye of the Sun within
the trajectory of Soueif’s oeuvre. In the Eye of the Sun is Soueif’s second book, first published in
1992, nine years after the release of her work, Aisha (1983), a collection of short stories. In
discussing the reception of Aisha -- which is concerned with topics that figure prominently in the
Western readers’ imaginary: virginity, polygamy, the peasant class -- Soueif speaks to the burden
of writing in English. In an interview with Joseph Massad, she admits that she was unaware of
the politics of reception, explaining that “it was a choice between writing in English or not
writing at all, so I wrote in English.”
55
Writing in English, however, was instrumental in how her
53
Soueif, In the Eye of the Sun, 469.
54
Ibid.
143
earlier work was received as works from an autoethnographer “unveiling” the exotic Arab world
to her Western, English-speaking audience. Here, I borrow Mary Louis Pratt’s term, coined to
describe writers and scholars from the periphery who partly collaborate with and appropriate the
idioms of the dominant discourse (in this case Orientalist depictions of Arab women).
56
Soueif
concedes Massad’s point that the early short stories are problematic because they present Egypt
in terms that perhaps the West is comfortable with: as a world that is very traditional,
very close to magic, ritualistic, a little brutal, and very sensual… And that is possibly
why they struck a chord immediately. Because, that was the Eastern world that the West
was comfortable with and wanted to read about.
57
This myopic framework motivates a critic for the Boston Globe to understand the themes
of In the Eye of the Sun as an exception. In this case, Asya is seen as an escapee from her culture.
He comments, “Unlike other Arab Muslim writers, Soueif deals with Asya’s sexuality, and the
complex sexual and emotional dynamics with the men in her life, in candid, even blunt terms.”
58
That is, Asya as she is a sexually aware, mobile, active and outspoken Egyptian woman, is
incommensurable with the production and consumption in the West of images of passive and
hidden Arab women -- that which Asya should be.
In the critical scholarship, these “freedoms” are attributed to Soueif’s linguistic choice,
which – it is presumed – allow her to break from the perceived confines of her language and her
culture. Amin Malak comments that
55
Ahdaf Soueif and Joseph Massad, “The Politics of Desire in the Writings of Ahdaf Soueif,” Journal of Palestine
Studies 28. No. 4 1999) 86.
56
Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (Oxon: Routledge, 1992).
57
Soueif and Massad 86
58
emphasis added.
Chakravorty argues that there is an erasure at work in these comments, citing the works of Nawal al-Saadawi, Tayeb
el-Salih, Hanan al-Shaykh, and the later works of Naguib Mahfouz as samples of Arabic literature that deals with
issues of Arab women’s sexuality (131).
144
the English language accords a liberating medium to the author to broach and delve into
issues such as feminine sexuality, politics of power and gender and the disfranchisement
of the poor: English here accords a liberating lexical storehouse and semantic sanctuary.
59
Malak here recycles the familiar dichotomy that pits Arabic as an oppressive and limited
language choice compared to its presumed more liberating English counterpart. The London
Review of Books critic Frank Kermode points to Soueif’s narrative structure and verb tense,
claiming that “this remarkable novel labours under what some might think serious
disadvantages,” among them are “numerous analepses loaded with pluperfects.”
60
However, the
scrutiny he affords her English does not extend to the Arabic names of the characters. That is, he
suggests a possible illegitimacy for being an Egyptian writing in English while the title of his
review misspells the protagonist’s name, Asya, by adding an “h” at the end of it.
Inserting myself in this analysis, I read Soueif’s use of English as a tactic deployed to
further destabilize regulating praxis within and outside of her nation. I read English as her
language of choice as operating in productive tension with her native, local Egyptian language,
troubling a seamless translation and rejecting her position as translator between two cultures. If,
as Gayatri Spivak theorizes, “the task of the feminist translator is to consider language as a clue
to the workings of gendered agency,”
61
Soueif’s staging of the incommensurability between
Arabic and English undoes natural and fixed categories of language.
While Soueif’s mastery of both the English and the Arabic language are unquestionable,
in the narrative, Asya’s continuously wavers between translating between the two. There are
several moments where Soueif presents scenes of untranslatability, foregrounding the
59
Amireh 161.
60
Frank Kermode, “Asyah and Saif,” Review of In the Eye of the Sun. London Review of Books, 1992.
61
Spivak 369.
145
impossibility of a smooth English equivalent to the colloquial Egyptian Arabic. That is, every
time Asya is placed to be a bridge between the two different cultures – in the linguistics class at
her university in England where she is made to pronounce Arabic words to English students but
is ultimately unable to,
62
as the spokesperson for the Higher Council for Family Planning in
Egypt, where the government’s promotion of a Western idea of family planning is laughed at by
the village women – she hesitates or silences herself.
63
In the village scenes, one unnamed woman’s wish for Asya is articulated as follows: “May
God make you happy and grant you a bit of a child to fill the world around you.” In contrast to
the very fluid English of the narrator, this and the other exchanges inflect rather than efface the
original language in which the women are communicating, a language that only exists in
Soueif’s head––a classed, Egyptian dialect. Phrases like “God willing,” “untie our bonds,” and
“a bit of a child to fill the world around you” are literal translations of an oral language. These
stylistic peculiarities of Soueif’s English reproduce lexical and syntactical features of the oral
Egyptian dialect, allowing the reader to experience a multi-linguality (and multiple class
positions) of the transliterated Egyptian dialect. In so doing, she distinguishes this language from
the prevailing values of the target language, English, and points not only to the limits of the
English language but also to the lack of cultural equivalence in English to incorporate the
women’s own family planning policies. Put another way, in not assimilating this language with
that of the rest of the text, Soueif exposes the cultural values of the village woman. For, referring
62
Soueif 354.
63
The narrator describes Asya, when, upon first meeting her, Gerald Stone asks for the Arabic name of the dessert
dish she has prepared: “She hates exhibiting Arabic words like this: a collection of sounds. And then hearing her
interlocutor try out a collection of approximately similar sounds” (485). In another scene, when she is preparing her
presentation for the village women, she tries to convey the message of the publishing company in Arabic colloquial
sayings, she says to herself, “ Shit. This won’t do. OK. Go back and cross out all those references to the will and
grace of God. Now what? Now it doesn’t sound like the way anyone would talk in Arabic, let alone in a village”
(21).
146
to Asya as “sister” and claiming a child will “fill the world around you” underscoree the kinship
structure the village woman value, in which Asya figures. They hail her as “sister” and they
assume that their own family values will translate to her. Soueif’s foreignizing of English,
through the translation of dialect, transmits an affective level that standard English (or Modern
Standard Arabic) lacks. Dialect serves the symbolic function of expressing an intergroup unity
and separateness from other groups. Thus, Soueif mobilizes her linguistic familiarity to gesture
to her own belonging in this community of women. However, she stands outside of it for she is
multiply hailed – by the neoliberal project, which sees her as a viable translator between east and
west, as well as by the village kinship structure.
Asya’s asymptotic relationship to national belonging is further elaborated on in a scene
where she is urged by an eclectic, international audience of colleagues and friends to translate a
bootlegged tape of Sheikh Imam, a protest singer banned by the government. The audience and
the remote setting – the scene takes place in a cottage in the North of England -- highlight the
gap between the message and the receivers. Asya's sister, Deena; Gerald, Asya's hippie lover
with whom she commits adultery; Marzouk, a Yemeni student; Hisham, who is suspected of
being in sympathy with the Egyptian secret police and his casual lover Lisa, are her audience. At
their request for translation Asya at first protests, explaining, "It's so local... It won't make any
sense unless I go into loads of background – and even then it'll sound naive because that's the
style of the song.’"
64
With the continued urging from her audience, she finally plays the tape,
pausing it every few seconds and translating every pun, parallel, irony and context of Sheikh
Imam's song. The explanation of the lines “Sharraft ya Nixon Baba,/ Ya bta‘ el-Watergate” are
translated as follows:
64
Soueif 496.
147
‘Well,’ says Asya, ‘as I said, he says, “You’ve honoured us, Nixon Baba – “Baba” means
“father” but it’s also used, as it is used here, as a title of mock respect – as in “Ali Baba”,
for example – that’s probably derived from Muslim Indian use of Arabic– but the thing is
you could also address a child as “Baba” as an endearment – a sort of inversion: like
calling him Big Chief because he’s so little – and so when it’s used aggressively – say in
an argument between two men – it carries a diminutivising, belittling signification. So
here it holds all these meanings. Anyway, “you’ve honoured us, Nixon Baba” – “You’ve
honoured us” is, by the way, the traditional greeting with which you meet someone
coming into your home – it’s almost like “come on in” in this country. So it functions
merely as a greeting and he uses it in that way but of course he activates – ironically – the
meaning of having actually “honoured” us.
65
Asya here stages the roar the Middlemarch quote in the epigraph of the novel’s introduction
promises. Forcing her audience to listen to that roar is uncomfortable, and cringe-worthy. It
remains as removed and as inaccessible, but as familiar and banal, as the grass growing or the
sound of the squirrel’s heartbeat. Her laborious, ungraceful effort at translation takes up two
more pages of text and, at the end, the frivolity, humor, spontaneity, and improvisation informed
by specific Egyptian cultural references are rendered moot and ineffective. She confesses, “The
awful thing, though, is that this is taking all these sentences to translate, and it makes it seem
ponderous and convoluted while in fact it’s totally direct; it’s language that a completely
illiterate, uneducated woman would use to her child –.”
66
Just as in the villages, the efficacy of
Sheikh Imam’s speech lies in its marking of the badges of belonging to the communities that
speak his language. Thus, the nuances and the multiplicity of the meaning of the text, its very
local quality, are lost on both Asya’s audience and the monolingual English reader. In her role as
a translator, she deliberately purifies the speech’s social and historical variables, leaving the
translation unequipped to reflect on the cultural meanings, effects and values produced by it. She
65
Soueif 496-7.
66
Ibid.
Hassan discusses a similar impossibility in the Map of Love. See “Agency and Translational Literature: Ahdaf
Soueifs The Map of Love,” 758-759. The political implications for this here are different, though. Whereas
translation functions in the context set by colonial discourse in The Map of Love, in In the Eye of the Sun translation
functions to situate her national belonging outside of ideology.
148
compensates for the foreign elements of the text by being too pedantic, too explanatory, and
overly literal. That is, she does not compensate in the English the colloquialism which makes the
Arabic so effective as a critique; rather, in explaining the colloquial Arabic, she breaks it down to
such minutia that the effects––of humor, of critique, of reaching the Egyptian masses––are lost.
These particular cultural markers highlight the internal barriers to cross-cultural (and cross-class)
understandings as well as to transparent communication. Her translation multiplies the awareness
of otherness that inhabits language.
There is a shared Egyptian culture here of music, formal oratory, and informal speech
acts, all informed by Egyptian dialect structure and style. Asya’s recognizing of the linguistic
and cultural differences, that which is the job of a translator to negotiate, points to her own
fraught position of narrating Egyptian modern history, for she, too, is not part of the audience in
the university. In fact, Deena mentions that the authorities make it difficult for Sheikh Imam to
perform and that the tape that she bravely carried out of the country was “not a real tape: just
something we recorded when he sang at the university last March.”
67
Asya understands that she
has access to a language that is “close” “direct” “familiar,” but she also speaks about it from a
distanced position – geographically, politically and economically. In her role as a mediator
between the east and the west, she presents the problems of misunderstanding and inequality, and
maintains a tension, as opposed to a perfect resolution between languages. This dissonance that
she creates is productive, because it is one that represents the vicissitudes of a nation in
economic and political flux.
In the Eye of the Sun, as an emblematic translational text, allows us out of a binary of
reductive representations of Arab women and an equally overwhelming attempt on the part of
67
Soueif 495.
149
“natives” to hold on to “tradition.” Soueif has seen herself out of this deadlock by foreignizing
English and domesticating Arabic, showcasing how translational literature makes manifest the
extremely complex processes of narrating a nation that is changing and becoming
unrecognizable. Through language, Soueif accesses the nation’s various histories and political
movements, while pointing to her own oblique position of narration.
Conclusion
In the Eye of the Sun both exceeds and interrogates the national and transnational
demands that totalize women It rejects the implications of nationalism, exposes its failures and
showcases alternative kinship and community formation that do not align with the homogenizing
project of Western feminism. The novel’s cataloguing of laughter across class at the nation’s
inability to read its female citizens, non-biological care-taking informed by Islam as combating
the desperate economic conditions, and the linguistic rejection of hybridity is at odds with any
attempt to write Arab history in terms of singular representative of female subjectivity. In light of
the pressures of the politics of reception under which Arab women are put, language for Soueif
becomes a rich terrain from which she enacts feats of inclusion and exclusion, domesticating and
foreignizing, to highlight the multi-positionalities from which to narrate Egyptian modern history
and to highlight the political context and power relations within which language use take place.
Soueif makes readers aware of Arabic contexts, intertexts and alterity. In her detailing of
alternative sites of political resistance --- through laughter and biological and non-biological
kinship structures -- as well as in her unique narrative poetics, she offers a model for
denaturalizing a world that can be too tightly packaged and too simply described (in light of the
critiques of Aisha, specifically, and the reception of Arab women, more generally). In an
acrobatics of language, the Citadel Publishing Company enlists Asya to translate the Egyptian
150
Higher Council’s message––which, presumably was crafted in Arabic––from English to Arabic.
The traffic in translation proves unsuccessful but her use of dialect marks her inclusion in a
community of women that she belongs to linguistically, but is ultimately excluded from by virtue
of her class and social mobility. In another site of translation, her relationship to the everyday
language and culture of Sheikh Imam’s text similarly reveal her linguistic access to an everyday
vernacular but her physical distance from the site of protest. In vacillating between foreignizing
and domesticating, Soueif does not excise an uncomfortable relationship with the nation, but
rather narrates through it, finding a home for modern Egyptian politics in the English literary
canon while, by translating dialect, affirms the presence of a community that has its own way of
being.
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CHAPTER FOUR
AN EXCLUSIVE REVOLUTION: DOMESTICITY AND CLASS IN THE TEXTS
OF THE 2011 TAHRIR REVOLUTION
The fact is that most of Egypt’s 75 million people struggle to get by, their ambitions
thwarted by rising prices, appalling state schools, capricious judges, a plodding and corrupt
bureaucracy and a cronyist regime that pretends democracy but in fact crushes all challengers
and excludes all participation. The visitor might well conclude that by damming up the normal
flow of politics, Egypt’s rulers risk bringing on a deluge. Will the dam burst?
-- Economist 2008
If nationalisms in the rest of the world have to choose their imagined community from
certain ‘modular’ forms already made available to them by Europe and America, what do they
have left to imagine?
-- Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories
So we ran through the underpass, scrambled up the bank, and found ourselves within,
inside and part of the masses. When we’d seen the crowd from a distance, it had seemed like one
bulk, solid. Close up like this, it was people, individual persons with spaces between them –
spaces into which you could fit.
-- Ahdaf Soueif, Cairo: Memoir of a City Transformed
In Mona Prince’s self-published 2012 memoir Revolution is My Name ( ﻲﻣﺳا وروﺛ /ismi
thoura), the political activist Asmaa Mahfouz’s vlog, and the Sawt project’s interview with two
vegetable sellers from Banha (a small city outside of the highly charged atmosphere of Cairo),
the double meanings of domesticity – as both the nation and the familial home -- function in
concert to articulate the women’s position in the 2011 Tahrir Revolution. This doubling is the
focal point through which to expose Egyptian women’s vision of national belonging in their
depictions of their experiences before, during and after the eighteen days that constituted the
2011 Tahrir Revolution. The cultural productions which emerged out of this event show
domesticity as an integral trope in envisioning the new, post-Mubarak nation. Analyzing
representations of domesticity – as gendered space, as the realm of family, marriage and
courtship, as well as household tasks such as cooking, cleaning and care-taking -- reveals that
Prince and Mahfouz’s vision for the new nation rests on an ambivalence towards a
152
disenfranchised, subaltern class (in Prince’s case) and an ironic reliance on gendered dynamics
that call for the men to protect the women (in Mahfouz’s case). They expand the political
function of domesticity, while disavowing the various class and religious biases and blindnesses
that undergird this new theorization of domesticity. This blindness, I argue in keeping with
Williams’ older definition of “revolution”, ultimately undermines the revolution’s attempt at
total rupture with the unjust regime of the past. This event’s inability to transcend the ideologies
of the time is brought into sharper focus through my analysis of interviews conducted for the
Sawt project — an upcoming documentary film that aims to understand a cross-class selection of
Egyptian women’s reaction to the 2011 Revolution — with two vegetable sellers living in
Banha. This oral medium, as opposed to Prince’s literary production or Mahfouz’s technological
expression, not only allows us to expose the heterogeneous ways Egyptian women across class
position themselves within the domestic sphere as well as the nation, but also uncovers the bleak
experiences of a largely silent and invisible citizenry.
Starting a Revolution from the Home: Asmaa Mahfouz’s vlog
Under stark economic conditions that profoundly impacted the very fabric of domestic life, and
silenced by the oppressive security regime, young Egyptians took to the streets on January 25
th
,
2011 to call for Mubarak to step down, mobilized by a vlog created by Asmaa Mahfouz.
Informed by quotidian life, and infused with culturally specific sets of meaning, the vlog aired on
January 18
th
, 2011 on Mahfouz’s personal Facebook page, in which the 26-year-old activist
urged her fellow citizens to go out in the street and protest on January 25
th
-- National Police
Day. In the 4 minute 36 second vlog, we find her in her home, with an insistent close-up on her
veiled head, and with the outside street noise interrupting her hurried imploring of the men of her
country to go out in the street and join the protest. The very ordinariness of her vlog is striking.
153
She is in a non-descript, plain house, with barren white walls behind her. Judging from the poor
quality of the video, it is apparent that she had filmed herself on her home computer. In
colloquial Egyptian Arabic, a recognized dialect of Cairo, breathless and with an obvious lisp,
Mahfouz calls what she imagines are her fellow compatriots to protest in the streets. The nation
she calls to action is Muslim, Egyptian and male. Examining the mechanisms she evokes to
persuade her audience to leave their homes, go out in the street and join the protests is crucial for
our understanding of her articulation of political participation and national belonging. That is,
her ironic mobilization of gendered roles is effectively deployed to effect political change.
Her message functions on a series of divisions: spatial, gendered, and religious. She
begins her call to action by recounting the desperation of a large majority of Egyptian people
whose economic conditions lead them to the extreme action of self-emmolition. She begins with
repeating the phrase
Four Egyptians set themselves on fire. Four Egyptians set themselves on fire from the
humiliation and hunger and poverty and from the degradation they have had to live with
for thirty years. Four Egyptians set themselves on fire thinking that what happened in
Tunis could happen here. Maybe we can have freedom, justice, honor and human dignity
(all translations are mine).
She proceeds to recount her own reaction to the four men’s death. She continues,
I went out and posted that, I, a girl, am going to Tahrir Square and I will stand alone and
I’ll hold up a sign and maybe people will show some awareness. I wrote my phone
number, so maybe people will come down with me. No one came except three guys. And
three armored cars of riot police. And tens of hired thugs, and officers came to terrorize
us. They then started talking to us and said, ‘Enough. We are one of you. We are from
the people. These guys who burned themselves are psychopaths.’ (emphasis mine)
Here, she reveals a precedent of her political activism, and exposes her unbending dedication.
Her gendered repetition of “I, a girl” suggests that the situation had come to such an extreme that
it necessitates a woman — the unexpected gender — to take action. The fact that only three men
154
stood in solidarity with her for the sake of those who set themselves on fire exposes her belief in
the passivity of Egyptian men as well as the efficacy of the Emergency Law in instilling enough
fear in the nation to thwart attempts at protest. More poignantly, it reveals her extreme courage
and bravery. Secondly, the officers who come to quell this small protest assume Mahfouz’s
complicity in imagining an exclusive community belonging by repeating the third person plural:
“We are one of you. We are from the people”. The “we” here is meant to level the social classes,
suggests a common goal, and a shared interest. The “we” also excludes the four men who
burned themselves, relegating them outside of this exclusive community of “we”, calling them
“psychopaths”.
She ends her account of the lack of involvement and interest in this early attempt at
protesting the regime by saying “I am making this video because I have one message for you: we
have to go out on the 25
th
. If we still have dignity, we have to go out on the 25
th
. We will go out
to fight for our rights, our rights as human beings (emphasis mine).” Echoing the officers’
evocation of a community, but for opposite motivation, she moves from her own disappointing
personal experience at protesting at an earlier date, to calling on a fictive all-encompassing “we”
to take action and to stand up for their – collective -- undeniable rights as human beings. She
sees herself as an active, able political participant.
From here, her message shifts to relying on a gendered dichotomy of meek woman/ brave
man. Yet, having already established her willingness, ability and experience in protesting in the
face of danger, we cannot help but read this as an ironic evocation. She calls on men’s chivalry,
urging them to leave their homes and come help protect her, aggressively addressing them by
saying, “Every person [in Arabic, she only uses the male version of the noun] who says that
women who go out to protest get beaten and abused, and that they shouldn’t go out and that it’s
155
haram,
let him have manhood and go out on the 25
th
”
Here, she mobilizes an understanding of the outside space as menacing for women to
goad the men into joining the revolution.
1 This is taunting and blatantly ironic since she began
her video by recounting her bravery, her acute political consciousness and her unwavering belief
in her rights. Conversely, for men, she links their reluctance to leave their home to passivity.
She, again, addresses the men: “Sitting at home, watching us on Facebook or in the news, is
abusing and ruining us, is abusing and ruining me! If you have honor and dignity, and if you are
human, and a real man, you would come out and protect me, and protect any other girl who has
come out.”
She calls on the virtues of “honor” and “dignity” which dictate that a man recognizes the
outside space as inhospitable to women and, in turn, fulfill his duty of protecting women from its
dangers, dangers perpetrated by the regime and its violent Interior Ministry.
2 Her shaming men
into action escalates by pathologizing their passive staying at home, insultingly saying, again,
using the male form of “you”,
If you stay at home, then you deserve everything that is happening to you. It will be your
fault; you will be responsible for everything that is happening in this country. You will
carry the responsibility of every person who has gone out in the street while you stayed at
your house.
1
The appeal to masculinity and honor in calls to protect the nation have precedent in other Egyptian Revolutions,
most notably the 1919 Revolution against the French. Ziad Fahmy explores this in his book Ordinary People
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), most specifically in his “The Egyptian Street: Carnival, Popular Culture
and the 1919 Revolution.” He discusses Sayyid Darwish’s play “Kullaha Yumayn” where the plays female
protagonist sings a song called “The Firemen” (Rigal al-Matafi). He writes, “The appeals to the masculinity and
honor of Egyptian males area also clearly on display in this particular song, especially because Egypt is represented
as female and the male firemen are urged to die while fighting the fire rather than face the dishonor” (164).
2
This sentiment is echoed in Ahdaf Soueif’s Cairo: Memoir of a City Transformed (New York: Pantheon Books,
2013) description of a clash with the Interior ministry months after the Revolution. In a scene she describes “two
older women, one with a hijab and one without. They shove several young men out of the way, and they’re standing
in front of the soldiers with their arms spread wide. “Shoot us then,” they say to the soldiers. “Shoot the women.
Shoot the mothers of Egypt. Shoot your mothers”(68).
156
Her repetition of “your fault”, “you will be responsible” “ you will carry the responsibility”
implicates the whole nation; no one is allowed to not participate. Her strategic deployment of
the gendered dichotomy of men protecting women has a history in Egyptian workers’ uprisings.
Threats to the safety of women’s bodies have typically been used by conservative forces to
preserve gender inequality and to instill the belief that women need male protection or
guardianship and they should stay at home and remain in so-called safe segregated spaces.
Women, however, have repeatedly deployed this rhetoric to incite men to action. In reference to
women’s involvement in strikes, that took place in the first decade of the last century, during the
embryonic stages of the 1919 Revolution against British Occupation, a political activist
explained the effects of women’s participation, “Their presence was a guarantee that their male
colleagues would not give up and leave.”
3
Women’s courage highlights men’s cowardice and in
order to avoid appearing cowardly, men also joined the strike. Thus, Mahfouz’ insinuates a
critique of power, appealing to traditional gender roles in order to defy the status quo, both
gendered and political. Furthermore, Mahfouz asserts Ann McClintock’s postcolonial
understanding of a woman’s position in the nation only to turn it on its head. McClintock
theorizes that nations have “historically amounted to the sanctioned institutionalization of
gender difference.”
4
This gender difference – generated in the domestic space -- serves to
symbolically define power between men. As a result, women are represented “as the atavistic
and authentic body of national tradition (inert, backward-looking and natural), embodying
nationalism’s conservative principle of continuity. Men, by contrast, represent the progressive
agency of national modernity (forward-thrusting, potent and historic), embodying nationalism’s
3
Manar Shorbagy, “Egyptian Women in Revolt,” Egypt’s Tahrir Revolution, eds. Dan Tschirgi, Walid Kazziha, and
Sean F. McMahon (Boulder: Lynne Rinner, 2013) 97.
4
Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge,
1995) 359.
157
progressive or revolutionary principle of discontinuity.”
5
Mahfouz discourse is revolutionary in
that she upsets this binary and paves the way for a total rupture of the past.
Continuing to ironically evoke the courageous man/ meek woman bifurcation, Mahfouz
declares to her male audience, “Don’t fear the government; fear God!” She elaborates by quoting
the Qur’an: “He will not change the condition of a people until they change what is in
themselves.” Here, she references the state of fear that the large majority of Egyptians lived
under, mainly due to the Emergency Law which, implemented by Mubarak after Sadat’s
assassination, “gives security agencies authority to detain civilians without charge or trial, to
refer civilians to military courts at which there is no right of appeal, to ban strikes,
demonstrations and public meetings of more than ten individuals, and to censor or close
newspapers.”
6
Although Mahfouz’s references to danger, fear, and courage are reflections of
Egyptians’ conditions of existence (except those of whom were exempt by their affiliation with
the regime), evoking the Qur’an interpolates Egyptian Muslims and overlooks the minority of
non-Muslims who also lived in a double state of fear – that of the Interior Ministry and also that
of being persecuted by the Muslim majority. The “we” that she evokes in her most blatant
statement of protest (we have to go out on the 25
th
. If we still have dignity, we have to go out on
the 25
th
. We will go out to fight for our rights, our rights as human beings”
7
is unstable – for it
includes her, given her history of political participation, but also men (there is no mention of the
women of the nation). In the same vein, her quoting of the Qur’an speaks to the majority of her
compatriots. This gendered and religious vision of the imagined nation she calls forth, thus,
reveals her classed position as well – since she was an activist with the workers’ movements
5
McClintock 359.
6
Rabab El Mahdi and Philip Marfleet, Egypt: The Moment of Change. London; New York: Zed Books, 2009) 23.
7
Emphasis added.
158
prior to the events of 2011 – and highlights the class specific position from which she articulates
her political message.
I have analyzed Mahfouz’s vlog beyond a progressive agenda of emancipation politics.
The question for me is not to find a preconceived progressive politics in the text. Instead, I
suggest a reading that may enable us to move away from liberal modernist interpretive strategies.
That Mahfouz as a woman in her home deploys a recognized association that links the woman
with the domestic space, and that she evokes the outside – although defiantly —as a hostile
environment for women asserts that a traditional male/female dichotomy remains a viable model
that allows her to call men to action as well as guarantee her presence in the protest. The success
of her vlog makes clear that the gendered dynamics, although used ironically, are
comprehensible and culturally accessible to a specific sector of the Egyptian populous – those
who are Muslim, male, who recognize the outside space as menacing for women, who place
value on not appearing passive or lacking courage and, importantly, those with internet access, a
cellphone or a computer. It is gendered, classed and religious.
Mona Prince’s Revolution
Whereas Mahfouz relies on the home as the woman’s domain, and by her leaving the
home, she upsets a traditional gendered separation, Prince’s memoir undoes the inside/outside
space dichotomy. Her narrative is mainly set outside in Tahrir Square with small vignettes in her
parents’ home or the Merit Publishing House. For Prince, domesticity is not confined to the
physical space of the home. In her imaginings, the revolution means transforming Tahrir square
– which stands in for the nation-- into a hospitable space, by partaking in the practical acts of
domesticity such as eating, cleaning, sleeping, and care-taking. In fact, these very everyday
gestures are constitutive of the revolutionary spirit. However, in keeping with the history of the
159
cult of domesticity in Egypt, the square as domestic space, and thus, the nation, is reserved for an
elite class, who is largely blind to class-specific grievances. Historian Hoda El-Saada eloquently
analyzes how domesticity in Egypt saw its genesis at the end of the 19
th
century in an elite class
— largely Syrian middle-class women educated in American, English or French missionary
schools — influenced by Western ideologies of the nuclear family and domestic life. In their
journals, they relied heavily on materials published in European and American journals about
women and women’s rights issues. In order to argue for women’s worth and improve their status,
they adopted a modernist discourse that professionalized and scientified the job of the housewife.
Prince’s memoir uncovers domesticity as integral to political mobilization and change.
Her text abounds with descriptions of people nurturing fellow visitors and protestors in the
square, sharing of blankets, warm clothing and even mattresses, feeding, distributing Coca-Cola,
cookies, lentil soup, endless cups of tea, cigarettes, as well as nursing the injured who clashed
with the police. In one point in her chronicling of her participation, she describes moving one of
her friend’s mattresses out into the square and accepting food from whoever is offering it to her.
On the Friday of Wrath, she and her colleagues make a total of three hundred sandwiches to
distribute among the people inhabiting the square. After fully immersing herself in the giving,
domestic culture of the square, she evokes a sense of newness and belonging that I read in a dual
sense: belonging to the nation as well as to the square, “For the first time, I feel like the square
belongs to me, not just mine, but belongs to everyone who is in it.”
8
It is the banal, domestic
gestures that are the vehicle through which she feels a new sense of belonging, and which
resonate with the understanding of revolution as an abrupt change with the past and inaugurating
a newness. People, in fact, inform her that they are scared to go back to their physical homes in
case they get arrested. Tahrir, they proclaim, is the safest place. The square, for the protestors, is
8
Prince 34.
160
imbued with a sense of at-homeness, in contrast to an external world that is threatening.
With our current knowledge of the violence that subsequently ensued, these evocations of
Tahrir as a safe home further underscore the power of the metaphor of domesticity. This
description of the performance of hospitality, feeding and caretaking – all emblems of a
household -- unbound by the physical confines of the home, and unanchored to a gendered body
(the gestures she describes are performed by both men and women) offers an alternative view to
Mahfouz’s ironic deployment of the imaginings of the outside space as dangerous (and thus
necessitating the nation’s male’s protection) and the inside as the non-revolutionary, apolitical
space. That is, these performances of domesticity demonstrate that the outside space that
Mahfouz evokes as dangerous have been made safe precisely by being peopled by men and
women sharing the same ideologies and visions for the nation. The domestic gestures of care-
taking, and feeding to represent their protests of Mubarak’s oppressive regime. There is
historical precedent to this. In studying the 1919 Revolution, historian Lisa Pollard in her book
Nurturing the Nation, argues that, “acts such as hospitality and charity – “nurturing the nation” –
were potent political symbols throughout the turbulent years of 1919-22. Caring for the nation as
a family had become an essential condition of modern Egyptian politics by 1919. A
preoccupation with charity during the 1919 Revolution was symbolic of political acumen, not
apathy.”
9
Besides the giving of food and the distributing of goods, the square is cleaned on several
occasions during the eighteen days. This literal cleaning of the square/home/nation is important
on a symbolic register for it can be read as a cleaning out of the old regime, the old square, and
inaugurating a new nation. This newness finds echo in a remark made by Roland Barthes in the
9
Lisa Pollard, “Introduction,” Nurturing the Nation: The Family Politics of Modernizing, Colonizing and Liberating
Egypt, Berkeley: University of California, 2005) 2.
161
early 1960’s concerning the new French vocabulary springing up in regards to cleaning. The
desire for cleanliness, Barthes argues, is the desire “to remake the virginity of the object over and
over again, to give it the immobility of a material on which time has no effect (the obsession
with cleanliness is certainly a practice of immobilizing time)” (45). In Tahrir Square, the
cleaning up of waste specifically highlights and attempts to undo the inadequacies of a corrupt
regime that failed to provide sufficient services for its citizens and, in turn, to envision a new
state. During the Mubarak years, the amount of litter on the streets of Cairo increased
exponentially. One of the reasons for the waste problem is attributed to the shift in Egyptians’
consumption of imported consumer goods. The number and variety of mass-produced consumer
goods grew at astonishing rates after the neoliberal economic “reforms” announced in 1990 and
1996. Soon elite Egyptians who could afford to pay American prices for snacks and fast food
were eating elaborately packaged food, contributing to the waste management problem. This
problem was compounded when, starting in 2000, the government privatized its sectors
responsible for waste collection and the zabbalin -- the independent workers who had gathered
garbage from many doorsteps in Cairo since the 1940s – were left without jobs. Several
European countries were given contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and substantial
tax breaks, to come in and replace these systems. Much of the equipment imported by the foreign
companies was incompatible with Cairo’s non-standard infrastructure.
10
Given this context, Prince’s description of women arriving on buses from the elite
neighborhoods of Cairo to clean the square helps us contextualize the domesticity she describes –
and thus the nation she imagines -- as class specific. On one of her shifts of security where she is
10
Sociocultural Anthropologist Jessica Winegar explains the gap in cultural understanding between the city’s
inhabitants and the European companies: “Company executives and government elites complained that Cairenes
were too ‘lazy’ to take their trash to the dumpsters, without considering the expectations of customers who had
enjoyed the convenient door-to-door services of the zabbalin or local mores that might make people feel
unrespectable carrying trash down the street in front of their neighborhoods” (Winegar 33).
162
responsible for searching the women entering the square, she notices a group of women from a
Christian Charitable Organization, all wearing green ribbons over their clothes. She deduces that
“from the looks of their clothes, and their hairstyles, they have to be from Masr el Gadida”– a
group of people who she proclaims “the revolutionaries had given up hope to reach.”
11
Her
mentioning of the elite neighborhood, Masr el Gadida, is significant because recent research in
urban planning has noted that many of Egypt’s rich have moved or are moving out of town to
super-elitist, new urban purpose-built cities, such as New Cairo to the East where they have the
privilege of ignoring the devastating state the country is in (United Nations Report 77).
12 Ahdaf
Soueif describes these urban developments in her book about the revolution, My City, Our
Revolution : “And in a noose around the city, they built luxury gates communities on virtually
stolen land, adorned them with water-guzzling golf courses, and called them ‘European
Countryside’ and ‘Beverly Hills.’”
13
Thus, Prince’s point about the Masr al-Gadida residents is
that they are literally hard to reach, being so far away from the center of town, but also hard to
reach ideologically speaking. The women from this neighborhood explain their desire for
participating in the revolution; the only way they could think of was through picking up trash, so
they hired a pick up truck and came to rid the streets of waste. They are insistent on their
political neutrality: “We are not part of anybody. We are not speaking on behalf of anyone.”
14
11
Prince 209.
12
Similarly, Rabab El Mahdi and Philip Marfleet detail how these houses were constructed on state-owned land
offered for sale as part of the reform process, Diane Singerman writes, “ With names like Beverly Hills, Dreamland,
and Hyde Park, suburbanized extravagant gated communities with golf courses, playgrounds, and sidewalks are
marketed and publicized to domestic and international buyers. The new Ring Road facilitates access to these new
cities, and buses bring workers from central Cairo to the new factories that surround some of the more successful
cities, such as 6
th
of October.” (7) Here the riot police of Egypt’s vast apparatus of public order are hardly visible. In
the city proper, police are everywhere.
13
Soueif 34-35.
14
Prince 209.
163
The waste management crisis that the privatized system proved inadequate in dealing with, to the
lament of the large majority of poor Egyptian who have to live with the filth, is now performed
by not only by the Coptic minority but by an elite group of women from a posh neighborhood.
Here, the definition of revolution as a reversal of the social structure is especially apparent since
the jobs that were performed by society’s poor males, for a waste crisis that predominantly
affected the poorest class, are now performed by elite women from an elite neighborhood. It is an
inversion of class and gender. Thus, part of the work of domesticity elicited several inversions:
not only are the minority elite women doing the work of the majority, poor class, performed by
men, the cleaning is a public gesture instead of a being confined to the private home. Although
the women emphasize their neutrality, their cleaning is still in support of a political change,
invariably politicizing a quotidian ritual.
Not only does the performance of domesticity’s practical tasks figure as part of the vision
of the new nation, but also Prince imagines a nation that includes the Coptic minority. This is
reemphasized at another point in her chronicling, where she ensures that an officer is properly
credited for placing his loyalty to the nation before his religious affiliation. After having spent
several nights in the square Prince becomes familiar with the officers assigned to protect it. One
of them she recognizes from the night prior and asks him his name. His response reflects the
sectarian tension in the country. He claims his name is Maged Buls (the reader deduces that this
is a recognized Coptic name) but he is known more by the name of Maged Gamal – a
recognizable Muslim name. She answers, “Forgive me, I don’t like to say Muslim or Christian
but I will write on Facebook that Officer Maged Buls is an Egyptian officer who opened fire on
the thugs and protected the protestors in Tahrir so that people understand that there is no
164
difference.”
15
She then elaborates that the explosion of the church in Alexandria is prominent in
her memory and no doubt in other Egyptian people’s memories.
16 Implicit in him being known
by a Muslim name is his fear of persecution and Prince’s “outing” him as a Christian showcases
her unique vision of the nation – that it includes Christians whose nationalism trumps their
religious affiliation. Her broadcasting his courage – this resonates with Mahfouz’s appeal to
men’s courage -- on Facebook is her attempt at correcting the memory of the Alexandria church
explosion and replacing it by proving religiously unbiased commitment to the revolution. She
emphasizes her religiously tolerant vision of the nation later that day, as she details a moving
image of Coptic men, joining hands, to protect their Muslim co-protestors while they pray.
17
Thus, Copts – both the female elite who come from the East of the city, as well as government
workers like Maged Buls, -- play a vital role in Prince’s account of the revolution and, for her,
inaugurate a new, more inclusive image, of the nation.
Prince reiterates her belief in newness in her description of the transformation that she
sees in the people, the new order that the revolution demands. She lists a series of firsts:
There are a lot of things happening today that are happening for the first time. For the
first time, I am in the middle of thousands of young men and nobody harasses me; for the
first time Egyptians clean the street. For the first time people share everything that they
have with them; for the first time when someone bumps into someone else they
apologize… or it’s not first time, but it’s been a long time… have we become a new
people?
18
This “we”, however, is specific, and not as inclusive as she proclaims. It does not include the
15
Prince 180.
16
Only a few weeks prior to the beginning of the revolution, on January 1, 2011, a car bomb killed twenty-three
Christians in a church in the city of Alexandria.
17
This image went viral on the internet. Here is a copy of the photo. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-
1353330/Egypt-protests-Christians-join-hands-protect-Muslims-pray-Cairo-protests.html
18
Prince 35.
165
original garbage pickers who are now unemployed because of the neoliberal reconfigurations of
the sanitation services, but it does include those who have the means to perform these cleaning
rituals as a symbol of their support of the nation and the revolution. The pronoun is
simultaneously inclusive and exclusive -- inclusive of the elite in the square but exclusive of
those who have suffered from the injustices of the state. Prince recodes and reconfigures
domesticity and transforms it from a banal task undertaken by the lower classes or lamented for
keeping women confined to their households to a means of participating in the revolution.
However, it is class specific.
The un-doing of the patriarchal order
Not only is Prince’s vision of new nation informed by practical domestic gestures, it also relies
on a new vision of the family. Marriage prospects and the possibility of a family are enmeshed in
the country’s political and economic circumstances. Moreover, the bleak economic conditions
resulted in a shortage in housing, which hindered young men’s (even the minority who possessed
the financial means) ability to marry or secure a bride. The younger generation’s inability to
achieve the domestic roles that were expected of them to reach their social standing was a large
impetus for the revolution. In the memoir, this is made evident in the beautification rituals Prince
undertakes before she joins the protests in its last days. For her, Tahrir Square becomes a stage
for romance and the possibility of finding a husband. When the fall of Mubarak is imminent,
Prince visits the hairdresser, justifying her visit by declaring, “Revolution does not mean that we
look bad and unkempt. I remember watching the Cuban Revolution in a film ‘The Lost City’ and
the men had grown out their beards and the women looked disgusting. I don’t want us to look
like that.”
19
Her vanity is important here because it highlights the gender specific performative
element of the revolution. The reference to the Cuban Revolution is also poignant because she at
19
Prince 205.
166
once creates an affinity between the Egyptian Revolution and the Cuban Revolution but at the
same distances herself from it because, unlike the Cubans, she wants to look good.
On another occasion, before leaving her parents’ home, her father asks her where she is
going looking so good. When she says “Tahrir” he comments that she looks as if she is going on
a romantic “rendez-vous.” She answers, “Yes, it is in fact a romantic date.” She says, “I am late
for Tahrir. I smile to myself about the way that I said that to myself. As if I was late to my love,
for example.”
20
Earlier in her memoir, she reverses the male gaze by openly flirting with one of
the officers. She boldly says, “You’re really good looking. Can I flirt with you?”
21
and
coquettishly laughs, while the officer blushes and remains silent; the revolutionary slogan “the
army and the people are one” is recoded here as romantic. That she feels bold enough, in a
conservative society which places value on women being modest and demure, to openly flirt
with an officer of the law signals a break from the past. Tahrir comes to symbolize hope for the
end of her singlehood and a possibility for romance.
The success of the revolution also doubles for the hope of the reinstitution of a successful
hetero-normative family. A couple she meets in the square tells her that, “We are going to Tahrir
for our little girl and the baby who is on the way so they can have a better future”
22
In the
publishing house, Dar Merit, Prince writes on a poster board -- “Now it’s possible for me to get
married and to have children. There is hope for the future. Yeah, there’s hope”
23
-- and goes out
in the square holding it proudly. Other people in the square carry posters that read, “I want to get
20
Prince 205.
21
Ibid. 189.
22
Ibid 129.
23
Ibid 131.
167
married. I want to get married and have children.”
24
Towards the end of the eighteen days, Prince
describes witnessing and participating in the “biggest wedding procession in history,”
25
where
newly weds decide to spend their first wedding night in the square, sleeping in a tent.
In the American context, Lee Edelman theorizes American investment in the vision of the
Child as emblematic of the future asserting that, “the Child has come to embody for us the telos
of the social order and comes to be seen as the one for whom that order is held in perpetual
trust… We are no more able to conceive of a politics without a fantasy of the future than we are
able to conceive of a future without the figure of the Child.”
26
Lauren Berlant echoes this
investment in the figure of the child as the hope for the future by saying, “a nation made for adult
citizens has been replaced by one imagined for fetuses and children.”
27
Edelman and Berlant’s
articulations ring true in the Egyptian context as well. That is, the proliferation of the slogans
Prince describes and that she herself displays highlights the people of the square’s investment in
the image of the Child as the vision for the future.
Importantly, while the vision of the future is invested in the figure of the Child, it also
necessitates a break from the traditional patriarchal rules of the past. Undoubtedly, the Tahrir
Revolution was begun by the youth that make up sixty percent of the population. Rebellion
against patriarchy was widely expressed; none of the major figures who stimulated and directed
events were members of the older generation. Most were no older than thirty. The organizers
chose to organize peaceful demonstrations rather than work through existing political channels or
via more conventional political activity. Most of the activists were upper-middle-class, secular
24
Ibid.
25
Ibid. 204.
26
Ibid 11.
27
Ibid 1.
168
and well educated.
28
Political scientist Tim Sullivan observes that the new generation of
Egyptians rather than having deference and respect for their elders “often show open disdain for
the failure of earlier generations to solve the many problems that plague Arab and Egyptian
society: Palestine is still under occupation, the Arab League seldom if ever does anything they
can be proud of, and the various governments of the Arab world are, to varying degrees,
regarded as tools of Western powers.”
29
He continues, “senior figures followed the lead of the
young people, and at no point in the process did the young people yield to the wishes of the
established elite or permit the process to be taken over by others. They started out in charge and
they remained in charge from January 25 until the resignation of Hosni Mubarak on February
12
th
.”
30
The understanding of the patriarchal family where the younger generation reveres and
follows in the footsteps of the patriarchal older generation is turned on its head. This is
reverberated in both Prince and Mahfouz, although differently. For Prince, there is political
dissonance between her and her parents. When they learn of her participation in the protests, her
parents cry and tell her to stay home, even expressing loyalty to Mubarak, exposing the
discrepancy between Egypt’s imagined past and its contemporary social and political reality.
Prince’s determined participation signals a breaking from the family roles of the past, where the
parents and the father dictated the rules of the household. On a different register, Mahfouz joins
the protest by using binaristic gendered discourse only to break it down and defy it. In a society
28
Tim Sullivan and Sean F. McMahon, “Youth Power and the Revolution,” Egypt’s Tahrir Revolution, eds. Dan
Tschirgi and Walid Kazzaiha (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2013) 76.
29
Ibid 74.
30
Ibid 77.
Ahdaf Soueif echoes this sentiment of the inefficacy of the older generations activism and politics: “.. this third
generation, in their twenties, are more clever and cool and effective than we ever were. We, the older
revolutionaries, have been trying since ’72 to take Tahrir. They are doing it. They’re going to change the world. We
follow them and pledge what’s left of our lives to their effort”(19).
169
where one’s identity is deeply embedded in one’s position within a larger family, Mahfouz’s
parents’ absence from her vlog -- which has the distinctive quality of being filmed within the
safe space of the family home, for the purposes, I have argued, of underscoring the danger of the
outside, political space -- is conspicuous. Both Prince’s and Mahfouz’s distancing from their
family suggests that this new generation is radically rethinking its relation to social and political
identity, and, more specifically, is actively reconfiguring the hierarchy of family roles without
the need for their parents’ approval.
The Tahrir Revolution as a Carnival?
In Prince’s description of the revolution, this upsetting of the familial, political and social
realms reaches a euphoric, celebratory pitch. Her descriptions of the later days of protest, when
Tahrir is completely occupied, are replete with descriptions of dancing – which she happily
participates in -- singing, soccer playing, and two weddings. Mikhail Bakhtin’s conception of the
carnival and carnivalestic life, which he partly defines as a “temporary suspension of all
hierarchic distinctions and barriers”
31
, supplies a useful tool with which to examine the events of
the Tahrir Revolution. He writes,
In a carnival everyone is an active participant, everyone communes in the carnival act.
Carnival is not contemplated and, strictly speaking, not even performed; its participants
live in it, they live by its laws as long as those laws are in effect that is, they live in a
carnivalistic life. Because carnivalistic life is drawn out of its usual rut, it is to some
extent “life turned inside out”, “the reverse side of the world” (“monde a l’envers”). The
laws, prohibitions and restrictions that determine the structure and order of ordinary, that
is noncarnival life, are suspended during carnival: what is suspended first of all is
hierarchical structure and all forms of terror, reverence, piety and etiquette connected
with it – that is, everything resulting from socio-hierarchal inequity or any other form of
inequity among people (including age). All distance between people is suspended, and a
special carnival category goes into effect: free and familiar contact among
people…People who in life are separated by impenetrable hierarchal barriers enter into
free familiar contact on the carnival square.
32
31
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984) 15.
32
Mikhail Bakhtin, Problem of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Ardis, 1973) 128.
170
Bakhtin’s above descriptions help theorize the events in Tahrir: the elite Egyptian women
cleaning of the streets; Prince’s flirting with the police officer; the suspension of tension between
the Muslims and the Copts; the young activists leading their elders, as well as the indiscriminate
sharing of food. However, the pressing question arises regarding the sustainability of these
reversals and the agency generated in the dismantling of these hierarchical divisions. The
exclusions that both Mahfouz and Prince visions of the nation rest on renders the carnival’s
subversive potential questionable.
Who belongs to the square? Questions of class
In Prince’s description of free exchange of food, blankets, medicine and drink, she makes
clear that people of the square industriously create their own production and distribution. In
doing this they free themselves from the economic world of the market that was the cause of
oppression. A barber sets up shop advertising “Revolutionary haircuts for free”; street vendors
offer food for free; a woman approaches Prince, eagerly intent on participating in the revolution.
The only means she has, however, are monetary. She, thus, hands Prince a hundred Egyptian
pounds and instructs her to do with it as she sees fit. Prince buys socks and distributes them to
those who have now made the square their home. Without devaluing the generosity of the
gesture, I read this monetary exchange and the possibility of establishing an alternative economy
– however temporary -- as an unsustainable privilege. That is, it is the minority with the excess
money who still yield control and have visibility.
Compounding my critique of the establishment of this alternative market economy is the
shadow of neoliberal economy that undergirds this memoir. It was this unjust economy that
served as the catalyst that established the huge gap between the rich and the poor, creating an
urban elite who greatly benefitted from it.
12
Thus, it is only an elite class who is able to afford to
171
purchase expensive Western imports. Throughout her memoir, Prince makes several mentions of
her iPhone. When she is left without a cell phone after she is arrested, one of her colleagues, an
unnamed Kuwaiti, gives her another iPhone for free. Absent from this exchange is the painful
ironic fact that this very gesture showcases the discrepancy in earnings, privilege and access that
a small class circulates in. The specter of the effects of the neoliberal economy that Sadat
instilled and that Mubarak solidified and advanced to his own needs are, although re-
appropriated for the purposes of participating in, documenting and communicating during the
revolution, reveal her class and her class blindnesses.
This is made most clear in an exchange she has with a girl distributing lentil soup; Prince
stops her and asks for a portion of the soup. The girl responds saying that this is for the people in
the square. Prince retorts, “I’m from the square.” The girl continues to adamantly and coldly
refuse and finally says, “Just eat something from your fridge.”
33
This scene is interesting
because of the significance the word “fridge” -- a device emblematic of a modern, bourgeois
household -- carries with it. That is, the girl’s mention of the fridge holds many other
assumptions – that Prince has a house with a space for a kitchen, as well as electricity to keep her
surplus of food cold. The free exchange of food – or the denial of food – is revelatory of the
privileges of an elite class that Prince is very much a part of. This is doubly ironic given
Mubarak’s regime’s tragically laughable use of the consumption of Western imports as an
indication that the Egyptian people are doing well. Years prior, Ahmed Ezz, the strongman of
the ruling party and a multimillionaire businessman, told Egyptians that they were doing fine
because 40 million cell phones were now in their hands. Even Mubarak’s prime minister, Ahmed
Nazif, who once said that Egyptians were not ready for democracy, told them that they must be
33
Prince 198.
172
doing great because there was an increase in the consumption of Coca-Cola”
34
Western style
consumption and consumption of Western products were used by the regime as a means of
numbing citizens from reacting against the injustice and keep them from protesting. Providing
Western products for consumption was supposed to make them think that they were just like
their Western counterparts; it aimed to displace their discontent and assuage their misery.
During the revolution, the security forces on behalf of the regime tried to quell the
revolution by mobilizing consumption of Western products in – albeit unsuccessful -- attempts to
dissuade an elite class from going out in the street and demonstrating. Prince details how
messages on Facebook, written in English, tried to pit one class against another, in order to argue
that one class has something to revolt against and another one does not. The messages that
circulated differentiated among people who own specific electronics: “people who revolt do not
have a DSL connection, Twitter account”. The messages urged people who “have a Blackberry,
Wi-Fi, Play Station, Wii, iPad, iPod, iMac, or any I” to stay at home. They called upon people
who had an expensive Western education: “If you had gone to any school that had an English
acronym, this is not your day. Let the people who go to other schools go out and revolt. This is
not your business. This has nothing to do with you”
35
Lastly, it interpolated people who
consumed Western cultural productions: “Anybody who watches “Desperate Housewives,”
“Dancing with the Stars” or “Glee”, stay put, stay home.” They concluded with a very class
specific message: “Revolutions are started by people who are hungry. If you do any of these
things, honey, why bother with a revolution?”
36
In the original Arabic memoir, Prince does not
transliterate the English words (a common practice) but instead keeps them in the original Latin
34
Quoted in Shorbagy’s “Egyptian Women in Revolt” 91.
35
Prince 18.
36
Ibid., 19.
173
script. Doing this, her memoir enters into collaboration or fusion with American cultural
capitalism and mirrors the regime’s attempt at interpolating an English speaking audience by
leaving these words in the original English. Here, the regime has forged a class identification
that separates an elite class from an impoverished, disenfranchised class – a class that has
something to revolt against and another class who does not. Prince does not comment on it but
her silence speaks to her deep ambivalence towards issues of class.
Her class ambivalences are most evident in her treatment and description of the peasant
classes, those who make up the majority of Egypt. Her memoir begins on January 14th, in the
privacy of her home, with her writing a Facebook post congratulating the Tunisians on the
success of their ousting their president, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali : “The Tunisians did it …
Bravo… it’s a respectable lesson to Arab societies that want to live and who really love life”
37
She then describes with journalistic sobriety the initial consequences that this has had on
Egyptian society: a couple of people, following the example of the Tunisian Mohammed
Bouazizi (credited for starting the Tunisian revolution) self-immoliated – the gesture with which
Mahfouz begins her vlog to assert as I have argued, her position as a political activist. Prince’s
tone is emotionless, sober and distant, reflective of her positioning within her nation. The effect
of her evoking of a political event outside of her nation, inside the privacy of a comfortable home
that she shares with her parents, illuminates the discordance between her belief in change and the
revolutionary zeal igniting all over Egypt. In sharp contrast to Mahfouz’s vlog, Prince’s
allegiance to the revolution was initially tentative. The headings for the two opening pages of
the memoir read: “Are we going to make a revolution on January 25
th
? Who knows?” “Will we
have a revolution on January 25
th
? Don’t know”
38
She transcribes her own hesitant Facebook
37
Ibid., 6.
174
post: “We will revolt on January 25
th
. I don’t know if we will be able to do it or not. But
maybe… maybe our happiness with what happened in Tunis will shake us up a bit…”
39
Here,
she places the beginning of the revolution in Tunis, which erases its local, long-lived Egyptian
roots. Once again, the pronoun “we” refers to a selection of Egyptian people who have not
revolted or protested before and who should look to Tunis for inspiration.
Although she remains hesitant about the efficacy of a revolution in Cairo, she decides,
ambivalently, to go out in the street. The description of the first scene of her participating in a
demonstration sees her as very tentative and reluctant to consider herself part of the movement –
again, in sharp contrast to Mahfouz. When an officer questions if she wants to participate, she
yells at him and walks away proclaiming that she does not “like crowds or loud noise.”
40
In the
memoir, she shares that she does not want to be part of the crowd because she doesn’t like “the
smell of sweat.”
41
Her membership in an elite, educated class greatly troubles her mediating and
authenticating engagements with the Egyptian streets. Whereas Mahfouz relies on a gendered
understanding of the spatial arrangement of the street, and dismantles it by going out to protest as
she has done in the past, Prince’s reaction betrays her class prejudice. For her, the outside space
is overcrowded, smelly and uncomfortable, indicating an aversion to the public sphere of Cairo.
The crowds and the smells that are repugnant to her are the very markers of the consequences of
the corruption, the overcrowding and the breaking down of government services, which resulted
in people’s joblessness and overcrowding in the street.
38
Prince 11.
39
Ibid., 9.
40
This aversion to crowds was echoed by Mohamed el Baradei, one of the leading figures of the revolution, who
was accused by the people of being too elitist to lead Egypt. He also complained of the crowds in Tahrir and
allegedly returned to his home after being in the square for a short fifteen minutes.
41
Prince 24.
175
After the first day of the protest, she becomes more convinced. Upon her return home,
she writes condescendingly on her Facebook page: “Greetings to the youth of Egypt who proved
to us yesterday that they are real men and respectable. An apology is in order for thinking that
they are stupid, that you need a doctorate to understand and to take action. Bravo!”
42
Here she establishes a dichotomy where “the youth of Egypt” – the affinity with whom she has
not yet established; she does not yet consider herself “from the square” as she asserts to the
lentil-soup-distributing woman who withholds soup from her later on -- have to prove to the rest
of “us”, including her and the rest of the educated members of society, what they are capable of,
echoing Mahfouz’s view of a “real man” as a person who is courageous and brave. She exposes
this liberal logic that sees education, an advanced degree, (Prince has earned a PhD in English
Literature from Ain Sham University and was an English lecturer at Suez Canal University and a
language instructor at Cairo University; since 2013, she has been a visiting professor and a writer
in residence at universities in the US and in Europe) as the only vehicle through which to gain
political consciousness and to take action. The “Bravo!” at the end signals her distancing herself
from the people who actually protested. It open up the question of her own self-positioning. Is
she self-critical for not participating? Does it display her humility or her condescension? No
doubt there is an ambiguity embedded in her praise here, in light of the fact that she did not
believe they were going to accomplish it because they did not have an advanced degree like her.
This developmentalist logic, which sees education as the means to enlightenment, has been
critiqued by Lila abu-Lughod and others as an inadequate one-size-fits all ideology, as a liberal,
modernist Western idea.
When she travels to Suez Canal to lecture, she describes her revulsion by the people
there. The beginning of chapter three, she explains how she hates the city of Suez and its people,
42
Ibid., 44.
176
elaborating that the people, the majority of whom come from Upper Egypt, are youth (shabab)
who
14
are either “poor and are thugs/mercernaries, who are unemployed or have few jobs, and
most of them take drugs. Those who have important positions are young people from outside of
Suez.”
43
Thus, before she is fully immersed in the spirit of the revolution, she displays her
revulsion by the people who are outside of Cairo, who are uninterested in university-acquired
knowledge and who do not belong to her social milieu. Later, when the inevitably of Mubarak’s
stepping down is clear, she celebrates the sa’ada, the people from Upper Egypt, who come to the
square. She says, “The people from Upper Egypt came and they changed the atmosphere. They
had noise-makers and they were wearing their traditional clothes. The Sa’ada are here!”
44
Here,
she distinguishes herself from them, but in a celebratory gesture as opposed to her prejudice at
the beginning. As Lila Abu - Lughod analyzes, “In the discourse of modernism, the baladi
person has always been denigrated for his or her ignorance, even while being valued for his or
her authenticity.
45
“Sha’bi’,” as Diane Singerman puts it, “carries ideas of indigenouness, and the
more negative descriptor baladi, which carries meanings of provincialism and lower class-
identity”. Prince oscillates between seeing the community from Upper Egypt as repositories of
the authenticity of the nation and disdaining their lack of sophistication and modernity as
meriting her annoyance.
Prince’s class prejudice eclipses the class-specific germs of the revolution which
flourished years prior to 2011 in a working class environment outside of Cairo – a history that
goes largely unmentioned in her memoir. The movement for change had begun in 1994, when
43
Ibid., 55.
44
Ibid., 187.
45
Lila Abu-Lughod, Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt (Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago press, 2005) 148.
177
7000 workers of the Kafr al –Dawwar Spinning and Weaving Company occupied their factory;
in 1998 workers of the Misr Helwan Spinning and Weaving Company protested the dismissal of
6000 of the 87000 workers.
46
According to the human rights’ and trade union group al ard’s
records, the number of worker protests grew from a monthly average of 15 in 2004 to 26 in 2006,
sixty six in 2007 and 32 in 2010. In 2007, more than 1 million workers were involved in 706
collective actions in twenty-three out of Egypt’s 27 governates.
47
On April 6
th
, 2007, workers at
the country’s largest textile factory, angry at the increase in bread prices, attempted to strike only
to be blocked by a massive deployment of security forces. In March 2008, a group of young
Egyptian activists – calling themselves the April 6 Youth Movement – launched a Facebook
page in support of a planned textile workers’ strike in the city of Mahalla al-Kobra to protest low
wages and high food prices. Learning of the plans for the Mahalla strike, a loose alliance of
civic activists called for a parallel national strike the same day. Lacking access to state media,
they used cellphones and the Internet to disseminate their messages. They crafted a manifesto,
which called not only for decent wages and lower prices but also for a “functional and
independent judiciary”, “freedom and dignity” and an end to “torture in police stations” – the
very demands of the 2011 revolutionaries. Analyst Manar Shorbagy, among others,
prophetically predicted in 2007 that the movement’s “significance lies in its transformative
potential as a broad political force of a new type that is uniquely suited to the needs of the
moment in Egypt. It is at once a cross-ideological force that has the potential, in the long run, of
creating a new mainstream and, at the same time, a movement of a new kind that is creating a
46
Brech de Smet, “Egyptian Workers and ‘their’ Intellectuals: The Dialectical Pedagogy of the Mahalla Strike
Movement,” Mind, Culture, and Activity 19.2. (2012) 254.
47
http:www.awladelard.org.
178
distinctive and promising form of politics for Egypt”
48
During the eighteen days that Prince
describes, there is no mention of workers’ movements and their proponents make no appearance
in her vision and experience of the square.
Although these economic grievances were part of a peasant class’s reality that they were
actively protesting against, it was a class specific issue that caught the attention of a larger
majority of Egyptians, exposing the class prejudice in the national imaginary as reflected in
Prince’s work. What caused a greater stir was the death of a middle class man—Khaled Said –
exposing the upper classes to police brutality. According to Said's family, the reason for his
death was the imminent release of a video of police officers dividing among themselves
confiscated money and drugs. The next day, the picture of the incredibly brutalized face and
body of Said flooded the internet. What happened to Khaled Said was not unique; this was not
the first time an Egyptian had been tortured to death by the police. However, his death
profoundly shocked Egypt's largely politically silent middle and upper-middle-class families,
who suddenly realized that their own children were also in jeopardy under the Mubarak regime.
49
Subsequent to Said’s death, the “We are all Khaled Said” Facebook page was established.
Although the “we” in the Facebook page’s title suggests a unified vision of the nation, it belies a
class specific reference and inclusion. In this light, Prince’s possessive pronoun “my” in the title
of her memoir Revolution is My Name is peculiar since the specific revolution that she claims is
hers fluctuates between blindness and exclusion of a large disenfranchised class. In addition, her
tentative belief in the spirit of the people, her imaging of a domestic square that coopts the initial
visions of the uprisings that took place outside of the city and outside of the square, along with
her espousal of modernist ideas of enlightenment speak to her positioning in a specific elite class,
48
Manar Shorbagy, “Understanding Kefaya: The New Politics in Egypt,” Arab Studies Quarterly 29.1 (2007) 39.
49
Shorbagy 100.
179
and, ultimately, I would argue, undermine the utopian ideals of inclusiveness that she engages in
and celebrates in Tahrir Square.
On Genre
Texts gain greater meaning when viewed in concert with the realities of their production,
and more important perhaps, their reception on the street. It is in their relationship with social life
that texts become activated and authenticated as genuinely reflecting popular concerns and
realities. In other words, cultural production, in any form, is not socially relevant unless animated
by the routines of everyday life. Thus, a discussion of the implications of Mahfouz’s and
Prince’s myopic views of the nation necessitates an engagement with the issue of genre.
Prince’s novel was self-published by Merit House, located steps away from Tahrir
Square.
50
Written from her first person perspective, the Arabic she uses is a mixture of
colloquial Egyptian Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic and transliteration of English words. As
Joel Beinin and Zachary Lockman note, the mere “decision to write in colloquial Egyptian
Arabic, even if not so intended, has often been perceived as a political act associated with a
nationalist program of populism, anticlericalism (though not irreligion), and local Egyptian
patriotism (wataniyya) as opposed to Pan-Arabism (qawmiyya).”
51
Prince’s narrative progression creates a linear arc, with a beginning, middle and end. In
its eclectic mix of journalism, diary entries, Facebook posts and transcriptions of people’s first
50
Established in 1998, the editor, Muhammed Hashim (who appears in Prince’s memoir several times, most notably
when he helps her make 300 sandwiches) has succeeded in creating both a vibrant publishing house and a literary
salon that – prior to the revolution – had met daily at Merit’s offices. In this new salon, authors gathered and debated
cultural and political issues, thereby anchoring the relation between literature and the political. As detailed in
Prince’s memoir, the publishing house during the revolution, became an address for donations for the revolutionaries
occupying Tahrir Square. Hashim received blankets, money, food and drinks every day.
51
Joel Beinin and Zachary Lockman, Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Communism, Islam and the Egyptian
Working Class, 1882—1954 (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1998) 192.
There is a subtle tone of anti-Gulf sentiment. When describing her happiness about the Sa’da finally coming to join
the square, she comments that their galabbiyas are so much nicer than the white ones worn by people from the Gulf.
180
person accounts, in a language that is informal, conversational, jokey, and irreverent, there is an
immediacy and hurriedness to the text. Her narrative enacts a breathlessness, as if she cannot
write fast enough to capture the constantly changing events. Her linguistic and stylistic choices
anchor her in the very present moment. However, the dissemination of the memoir, which was
translated by AUC professor Samia Mehrez, is likely to be largely in the West, or restricted to an
elite Egyptian audience, given the statistics of Egypt’s literacy rates. Mustafa Kamel el- Sayyid
writes that “the world Bank’s World Development Indicators of 2011 put the adult literacy rate
in Egypt in 2009 at 66% with average years of school ranging between nine for the poorest and
12 for the richest.”
52
Benedict Anderson, in Imagined Communities, depicts a type of reading
that is private, and meditative, or as he describes it, “Performed in silent privacy, in the lair of the
skull.”
53
Besides the unlikelihood of the average Egyptian living in poverty reading Prince’s
memoir, the fact that it eclipses issues of class and, in fact, displays unabashed prejudice towards
the poor of Upper Egypt, risks the possibility of her class prejudice remaining unchecked and a
myopic vision of the revolution would come to stand in as the standard. Already, in the literary
attention that she has garnered, her memoir is lauded as an authentic chronicling. In his review of
the memoir, Elliott Colla writes, “Much of how revolutions are remembered collectively has to
do with process. Individual experience becomes memory. Memory becomes narrative in the
form of memoirs, accounts, and novels. Canonized and institutionalized, these narratives begin to
form official and unofficial forms of history.” The risk that arises with the possibility of
canonization – and stabilizing it as history -- is that, history, again, becomes the record of the
elite minority. The “collective” memory that Colla discusses becomes the memory of those who
52
Mustafa Kamel el- Sayyid, “What Went Wrong with Mubarak’s Regime?” Egypt’s Tahrir Revolution, eds. Dan
Taschirgi, Walid Kazziha and Sean F. McMahon (Boulder: Lynne Rinner, 2013) 14.
53
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (New York:
Verso Press, 1991) 35.
181
had the means, the privilege and the desire to record it.
54
In the case of Mahfouz’s choice of using Facebook as a vehicle through which to
disseminate her political message, many analysts of the revolution have posed the question of
whether this was a “Facebook Revolution.” To answer this, Linda Herrera’s article analyses the
use of digital media in the uprising, arguing that political and social movements belong to people
and not to communication tools and technologies. The virtual public square that Mahfouz calls
from, and which stands in for her vision of the nation, is a gendered, Muslim one. Moreover, her
choice of using colloquial Arabic — specifically a marked Cairene dialect — speaks to the wide
audience that she strives to attract. Ziad Fahmy reminds us that “to be considered part of popular
or mass culture, a cultural product must be accessible to all, which in Egypt requires it to be
articulated in colloquial Egyptian Arabic”
55
The fact that it spread quickly is attributed to the
ubiquity of cell phone and internet use in Egypt. The article “What Went Wrong with
Mubarak’s Regime?” analyses how the Mubarak regime was unwittingly offering new
opportunities for counter-mobilization through its promotion of the use of computer and Internet
facilities. Inspired by a modernist vision of Egypt’s future, and convinced of the usefulness of
the computer, the regime adopted policies that helped young Egyptians to learn use of the
computer and eased their access to the Internet. According to the Ministry of Communications,
the number of Internet users in the country grew from 16.3 million in 2009 to 22.6 million in
December 2010. This development also coincided with a massive expansion in the number of
mobile-phone users to 66.9 million in 2010, an increase of 25% from 2009
56
Both Mahfouz and
54
Jessica Winegar’s discussion of privilege and its connection to revolution is also apt here. See “The Privilege of
Revolution: Gender, class, space and affect in Egypt”
55
Fahmy, Ordinary Egyptians, 4.
56
El-Sayyid 14.
182
Prince have self-consciously selected specific genres to disseminate their message. Their unique
mediums betray complex issues of exclusivity, class, gender and religion.
Continuing to rely on domesticity -- in its multiple meanings -- as a useful frame of
analysis to expose who belongs in the nation, as a way of comparison, I would like to share an
interview from the Sawt project, a documentary in the making that aims to give voice to
women’s central role in the Tahrir Revolution. The
filmmakers interviewed various Egyptian
women from different classes, ages, political affiliations and varying locations in the nation to
chronicle a heterogeneous account of the effects of the 2011 revolution on women’s lives. As a
translator of the women’s transcribed interviews, I encountered an interview that was unlike any
others -- between Zeinab and Awatef, two illiterate vegetable sellers from Banha. Translating
this particular interview required intense labor and extensive deciphering on my part because the
women continued to repeat themselves in a marked non-Cairene dialect, and, judging from the
elisions in the tape recording, they were having trouble understanding the function of the tape
recorder.
Unlike Prince’s and Mahfouz’s clear linear narratives with a distinct message they
wished to communicate to a direct audience, these women’s interview – perhaps because it is a
transcription of a conversation, perhaps because of their apparent inexperience with being
interviewed and speaking into a tape recorder -- is labyrinthine, repetitive and meandering; they
are evidently unconscious of their audience. However, what I deduced from their description of
their domestic lives was stark: they were unheard and unseen by the state prior to the revolution
and, judging from their reaction to the revolution, they remain outside of the dominant image of
the nation. Orphaned at a young age and claiming that they have no brothers to help them, they
have been cheated out of their inheritance, betrayed by their husbands, which has resulted in
183
them having no proper food to eat, and being forced to sit in the street selling vegetables in fear
of being reported for occupying the street. They repeat that the government should have laws
unique for poor people like them.
The description of their domestic rituals offers a very different perspective of the nation,
especially in regards to their marital life and gendered roles. Whereas Mahfouz relies on the
traditional role of men protecting women to goad men into joining the revolution and Prince sees
the end of the Mubarak regime as a hope of solving the marriage crisis and the possibility for
future children, the women from Banha provide a bleaker perspective on male/female
relationships. With the debilitating economic conditions, the state’s inability to provide, and
having been cheated out of their inheritance by the male members of their family, they have had
no recourse but to rely on the institution of marriage to provide them a house and financial
security. However, with one husband remarried and sending money unreliably, and another
husband mentally unstable because of the losses he suffered due to the dwindling economy and
corruption, it becomes the women’s responsibility to find the means necessary to feed their
children and prepare their daughters of marriageable age for marriage. For them, their husbands
are a burden. When Zeinab confronts her husband about his second marriage, he suggests she
leave. She recounts, “’Leave and go where?’, I said to him. I don’t have a place to sleep. Should
I sleep on the sidewalk? Or should I sleep in the street and be a beggar with my children? So I
accepted my fate. He got married and I accept my fate.” ‘Awaatef details her husband’s nervous
breakdown when his shop was destroyed by the government and now, given the fact that there
are no government health services to help them, she has to take care of her now disabled
husband, as well as prepare her children of marriageable age for marriage.
They explain their livelihood and their dire situation through the food they eat and their
184
ability to maintain a domestic household, feed their children and marry their daughters. Prior to
selling vegetables on the street, they worked in a kiosk that sells Clorax and soap, which
painfully ruined their hands. The symbolic role that the rituals of cleaning takes during the Tahrir
revolution which Prince refers to are evoked in a starkly different, oppressive light. The Clorax
brand – a symbol of the private companies that are selling their products to the rural poor -- does
not function symbolically, as it does in Prince, to symbolize the cleaning out of the new regime;
instead, it hurts Awatef’s hands and its sales do not sufficiently provide for her children
Unlike Mahfouz and Prince’s specific audience that they consciously interpolate, the
vegetable sellers are unclear about the interviewer’s role, or her position in the government. They
desperately and repeatedly ask the interviewer to help them, saying, “If you could find some
generous people who could help us. I don’t want much. I just want one thing. If I could have a
room and a living room. I would save my dignity and I would have left the one who threw me
out.” She concludes, “I am poor and miserable. I am not asking but to feed my children and buy
them nice clothes and I want justice in the world. I want a law that is just for people who are
poor like us.” For them, the revolution was ineffectual -- on both practical and symbolic levels –
in changing their lives. When asked to say a little about it, Zeinab explains, “We feel that the
country has stopped… What was the point of the demonstrations? What did it do for us? It
stopped the country.” This image of the country “stopping” strikingly contrasts with the rhetoric
of change and rupture with the past that is theoretically evoked by Williams and more concretely
envisioned by Mahfouz and Prince. Again, the women of Banha understand the political
situation through the effect it had on their domestic lives, specifically, here, as it pertains to food.
Whereas in Tahrir Square, Prince describes no lack, with packaged, globally-circulated products
like Coca-Cola and cookies being distributed with no hesitation, the women of Banha compare
185
the price of meat before the revolution and after. ‘Awaatef recounts how it has been more than
six months since she could afford to buy meat for her children.
57
Throughout the interview they
eschew any prolonged discussion of the revolution, instead repeating the details of poverty’s
effect on their domestic lives – how it effects their capacity to purchase meat, care for their
children, financially provide for their daughters’ weddings. This underscores the overlooked
reality that the revolution served a fraction of the population -- those who had access to Tahrir
Square -- while people outside of downtown Cairo, without the means to travel, were literally
unable to participate and are thus not imagined in either definitions of domesticity ( both in the
sense of the private home and the sense of the nation) that Mahfouz and Prince articulate. They
are excluded both from the nation-state and its services and also from the private domestic space
of their homes.
Conclusion
This chapter has focused on domesticity’s function as a metaphorical device through
which we can understand the nation as it is depicted in Egyptian women’s texts instigating or
reacting to the revolution. Domesticity articulates an alternative to the hard discourse of
nationalism and exposes the desire of inclusion in the nation. It becomes a soft nationalism that
allows the banal and the familiar to be valued and brought into focus. It is a way of thinking the
nation without the accounts of violence that saturate the international media. My analyses of the
texts have uncovered the exclusionary and inclusionary processes that underwrite two Egyptian
women’s visions of the nation through the framework of the double connotations of domestic –
57
Increased prices for basic goods have brought further problems and deterioration of living standards for most
Egyptians. Wage increases have not matched inflation and purchasing capacity has declined sharply. In 1970 the
monthly salary of a new university graduate appointed by the government could buy 68 kg of meat monthly (beef is
the main source of animal protein in Egyptian cuisine). In 1977 the salary was increased to E 28 pounds monthly,
enough to buy 35 kg of meat at prevailing prices. Finally, in 2008 the salary of a new government employee
increased to E 210 pounds monthly, enough to buy 6 kilos of meat (el Nagger 43).
186
as standing in for both the nation and the private family home. For Prince, revolution – the
possibility of abrupt change or mutation in history – is seen from the vantage point of a
domesticity that includes the Muslim majority and the Coptic minority, that sees the revolution
as a hope for the end of the marriage crisis caused by the severe economic crisis that she is
wildly blind to, and is unrooted in class grievances. Her failure to evoke the uneven
developments, the exclusions, on which revolutionary movements are necessarily based speaks
to her myopic vision of the idealized space that Tahrir came to represent to an elite class. On the
other hand, Mahfouz, from the vantage point of her home, uses traditional dichotomization of
space to provoke a Muslim male audience to participate in the revolution. Finally, through an
analysis of the function of food consumption and marital status, the interview with the women of
Banha exposes the women’s inability to engage with the discourse of the revolution and,
inadvertently brings to light the bleak details of their domestic lives, troubling the varying links
between domesticity and revolution that Prince and Mahfouz rely on. Without overlooking the
representational dilemma facing each medium, together, these texts serve as an alternative view
of the prevailing image of women’s experience of violence and powerlessness.
187
CONCLUSION:
LOOKING FORWARD
Focusing on representations of kinship relations, sexuality, motherhood, and practical household
concerns in Egyptian women’s texts, this dissertation has analyzed how cultural representations
of domesticity and political consciousness function in concert to construct a vision of
emancipation that deconstructs the epistemological underpinnings of “feminist” discourse about
Arab women and revalues the domestic space as a site of political empowerment. My
deployment of domesticity’s relationship with revolution as a site of analysis sets to work
underemphasized perspectives within the Western academy that challenge presupposed ideas
about women’s role in both their homes and their nation in revolt. Using the historical events of
revolution is important because they are moments of possibility, potential rupture, and regime
change. And, as I have dedicated my work to analyzing, domesticity continually figures into
these indeterminate historical moments. Revolutions throw the stasis into upheaval, keep
tensions in abeyance, instead of resolving them. They are imprecise and contradictory.
I studied a variety of texts produced during the time of each respective revolution – Huda
Sha’rawi’s personal memoirs as well as its English translation; translated as well as the original
works of Latifa al-Zayyat, depicting the 1952 Revolution through courtship metaphors; Ahdaf
Soueif’s translational texts which – in switching between domesticating and foreignizing
techniques – marks an oblique yet viable position from which to narrate Egypt switch from
Nasser’s socialism to Sadat’s neoliberalism; and, lastly, youtube videos as well as fiction and
non-fiction produced during the events of the 2011 Arab Spring. I read the works in the original
Arabic, which, through analysis of the authors’ choice in using Egyptian dialect or Modern
188
Standard Arabic, when available, allowed me to discover how class factors in the imagining of
the new nation.
In sum, I deploy the term “domesticity, to domesticate, domesticating” on multiple
registers – on the level of textual analysis, and on the social lives of the texts, as they move from
one language to another. Moreover, using domesticity as it is employed in translation theory
allows me to analyze how the texts are differently worlded, and how they can be used for
different reasons at different historical moments. Studying the dynamics of translation strategies
– in the broadest sense of the term, translating between a colloquial oral language to a written
standard language, and translating from a Arabic to English -- unsettles a concretizing of
historical events, and opens up and encourages an ethics of constantly translating. It maintains
the dynamism of the texts. It upsets the dichotomy between the nation and the non-national
because many of these texts exist and circulate in the global north.
Domesticity, as it is employed in translation theory, allows me to uncover unseen sites of
Arab women’s position on the literary stage, how they have to be domesticated to fit a certain
rhetoric, or how they manipulate language, in the case of Soueif, to mark her relationship to a
changing nation. Similarly, in the case of al-Zayyat, by using dialect, she articulates her Marxist
politics. But, because of the incommensurability between English and Arabic this shift in register
is inevitably elided – by no fault of the translator. Domesticity and translation place language at
the forefront of articulating a political movement.
This project relies on theoretical reflections that explore elements of different feminisms
but, principally, undertakes close literary analysis of these works in their original language(s) as
well as their translation. It is at the juncture of two fields – Arabic literary studies and
postcolonial feminist theory – that this project operates, introducing to feminist studies the
189
specificities and ambiguities of domesticity as a nationalist praxis and bringing to the reading of
Arabic literature the critical perspective of postcolonial and gender theory.
My interest in this research developed within the academic classroom as well as outside
of it. Throughout my studies in the western academy, I have been mainly exposed to feminist
theory and literature that focuses on generalizations of Arab women’s victimization inside their
homes, which contributes to a perceived absence of agency or voice in the political realm. My
experiences outside of the classroom continually echo these stereotypes. When people discover
that I am of Egyptian descent they often ask me whether Egyptian women are allowed to leave
their homes unescorted or if they are allowed to work for a wage. Knowing that this was the
prevailing image that circulated in the academy, in the media and in the cultural production that
was selectively exported and translated from the Middle East to the west, I have committed my
time – both within and outside of the classroom – to dispel these assumptions.
Four elections, three referendums and five constitutional declarations later, we still do not
know. Change is dreamed of as linear but it has become obvious that is not. It is messy and
circular, painful and violent. However, there is a desire to narrate, to process, to diversify the
narrative, and to anesthetize, problematize and critique it in the cultural arena. Wiam El-Tamami,
an activist in the recent uprisings, reflects on the multiplicity of narratives that emerge to narrate
the revolutionary moment.
I am not referring to the multiplicity of ideological agendas directing the telling of the
news, and their deliberate distortions and manipulations: I am referring to the basic, bare-
boned format itself. The very claim of impartiality, of factuality, is dangerous and
disfiguring, in particular when imparted with such a tone of authority. The modes of
telling: reporting that a rock, somewhere, dropped into water, while telling nothing of the
water, of the ripples. The focus on death, catastrophe, and on political machination
grinding on. The headline, the zoom-in, the soundbite.
58
58
“A wish not to betray,” Translating Dissent (London: Routledge, 2016).
190
The new generation of digital media technology has enabled ordinary citizens to interact and
publish news items as well as their own memories about what happened, rupturing the state
sponsored narrative that often attempted to minimize, or erase, the turbulence on the street, and
the international media that focused only on numbers, deaths, and rape. Blogs and Facebook
posts became popular venues for sharing eyewitness accounts and first-hand experiences of
specific events. There are other ways that the narrative of the nation is changing, and translation
is a key part of it. The stories are now outside of the Egyptian publishing market. For example,
Qahera,
59
-- a webcomic launched by then eighteen year old Deena Mohamed -- described as an
“anti-misogyny, anti-Islamophobia, visibly Muslim superhero who engages with her
environment critically and hopes to improve it”.
60
Also, the Women and Memory Forum (WMF)
oral history archive which “aims to document and preserve memories of Egyptian women’s
experiences of and engagement with the social and political upheavals that shook Egypt and the
Arab world since 2011”
61
However, the authorities have cracked down on creative expression across the region.
62
In Saudi Arabia, the poet Ashraf Fayadh was sentenced to death in 2015 for his verses, which
religious authorities called blasphemous. After an international outcry, his sentence was reduced
to eight years in prison and eight hundred lashes. In Egypt, under the strict rule of current
President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the government has shut art galleries, raided publishing houses
and confiscated copies of books it views as controversial. To note one in many examples, in
59
See Deena Mohamed, “On Translating a Superhero: Language and Webcomics,” Translating Dissent pp. 137 –
147. Her webcomic can be accessed at www.qaherathesuperhero.com.
60
Ibid., 138.
61
Hoda El Sadda, “An Archive of Hope: Translating Memoirs of Revolution,” 149, in Translating Dissent, 149.
62
The crackdown against journalists (Mahmoud Abou Zeid, also known as Shawkan; Ismail Iskandarani; Hossam
Bahgat; has also proliferated. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, the number of journalists in
detention had doubled since 2015. (https://www.cpj.org/)
191
2015, Egyptian custom officers seized four hundred copies of Walls of Freedom – a book
concerned with Egyptian political street art, and charged that the book was “instigating revolt.”
63
Despite explicit protections of free speech in Egypt’s 2014 Constitution, the authorities have
targeted individual writers and artists. For example, currently, the novelist Ahmed Naji is serving
a two-year prison sentence for violating “public modesty” with sexually explicit passages in his
experimental novel The Use of Life. As I write this, the all-male satirist group Atfal al-Shawarea
(Street Children) are being charged for a video clip posted on their official Facebook page on
May 2, 2016, where the group criticized the crackdown against Egyptian activists protesting the
handing over of two Red Sea islands to Saudi Arabia on April 15, 2016. In the video, the five-
member troupe -- Ezz el-Din Khaled, Mohammed Adel, Mohammed Yehia, Mohammed Gabr,
and Mohammed Desouki -- recorded on a street in Cairo in the group’s selfie style. The young
comedians also made fun of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s supporters. They were prosecuted
on accusations of “posting videos that incite protests” and “insulting state institutions”,
“instigating a revolt against the government”, “forming a group aiming to challenge the
principles of the state and ruling authorities”, and “disseminating false information that disturbs
public peace”.
64
Their Facebook page has been suspended on May 11, 2016. These are just the
most recent examples on the crackdown on artistic expression. There are countless others, and
more to come.
Revolutions are moments of uncertainty that – at times – defy narration. They come in
unpredictable phases. There is unexpected fluidity. Khalid Abdalla – an actor, producer, and
film-maker, founder of three collaborative spaces in Cairo: Zero Production, Mosireen, and
Cimatheque -- explains that Deleuze’s idea of “becoming” comes close to encapsulating his
63
http://www.egyptindependent.com.
64
http://artsfreedom.org/?p=11367
192
experience of revolution. For Abdalla, “[becoming] identifies most accurately a way in which
material circumstances can exist but be challenged, as an uncertain gesture towards the future to
free oneself from the past. What something is becoming, it has not yet become, but nonetheless it
has a space in the present.”
65
The cultural productions analyzed in this project, as well as the ones that are being
produced as we speak – in Egypt, as well as abroad -- have implications in our understanding of
revolution. Given the resemblance of Sisi’s reign with the Mubarak regime, many have deemed
the revolution as a failed one. Many facts would corroborate this. However, as the corpus I study
reveal, in these moments we have openings; we have moments of change and possibility.
Revolution is non-teleological but there is potential, potential in the points of failure. They’re
movements of rupture that don’t succeed as a linear national narrative, but they’re productive
moments. They resist teleology, and excavate different forms of feminism and political activism.
It’s not a closed story. It’s okay not to succeed or fail, but to remain in moments of
abeyance between the two, in becoming. What is sure, is that there is a space to narrate
domesticity – however momentary, however utopian, in all its instabilities, and inconsistencies --
as a feminist politics that presents a kinship model that expands the confines of third world
feminism.
65
Baker, ed, Translating Dissent, 42.
193
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Abstract (if available)
Abstract
This project uses the historical events of Egypt’s three revolutions—1919, 1952, 2011—as the structural framework to investigate the interlacing of the tropes of revolution and domesticity in Egyptian women’s political novels, memoirs, and video blogs. Examining Huda Sha’rawi, Latifa al-Zayyat, Ahdaf Soueif, Mona Prince and Asmaa Mahfouz’s texts, I contend that these writers and political activists engage with issues of domesticity not only to incite, participate in, and critique their respective revolutionary moments, but also as a means of imagining a post-revolutionary nation. In each text, the image of the new nation is inscribed as central to the happenings of the home
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Ayad, Nada
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Revolution and domesticity in Egyptian women's political texts
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College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
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Comparative Literature
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07/30/2018
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05/06/2016
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Arab nationalism,Arab Spring,Arab women,Arabic translation,domesticity,Egyptian dialect,Egyptian Revolution,nationalism,OAI-PMH Harvest,Orientalism,postcolonial Egypt,Third World feminism
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Tags
Arab nationalism
Arab Spring
Arab women
Arabic translation
domesticity
Egyptian dialect
Egyptian Revolution
nationalism
Orientalism
postcolonial Egypt
Third World feminism