The Open Door

by Latifa al-Zayyat

  She stopped and took her hand from his. She spread it out before him triumphantly. He realized that she had cast away her engagement ring. He grabbed her shoulder and shouted, his voice shaking, “You’re free! You’re free, love!”

  Layla dropped her arms and felt a lovely peacefulness creeping into her body, a tranquillity more lovely and deeper than the bubbly happiness that had filled her. She looked at Husayn and smiled. She took a step, Husayn’s eyes never leaving her. No, it was not the same glow as before. It was new. There had been that flash of light that had gone out, the sun on an overcast day. This was quiet and warm and steady, a light that emanated from within. Husayn sighed happily. “Finally . . . we’re there.” Layla’s face shone as she gazed straight ahead.

  “How many years have we been waiting for this day?” said Husayn. Layla’s eyes swept over the people, loudly victorious, and said, “All our lives.” Husayn gazed into her eyes, ran his finger along her arm, and softened his voice to almost a whisper. “You and I, Layla.” Tears shone in her eyes. “Still ahead, all our lives, Husayn.” Their steps slowed; they were too full of feeling to speak. Layla felt overwhelmed, and she leaned her head against Husayn’s shoulder. Her eyes sparkled with a mischievous look and she said, as if playing an amusing game, “Is this the end, Husayn?”

  Husayn’s face lit up and he held back his laughter as he joined in the game. “This is not the first time you have asked me that question, Layla.” They both burst into laughter, like two children playing. They were silent again, gazing at the crowds pushing in front of them and behind them, too, a huge, victorious wave sweeping all before it. Eyes awash with the depth of his feelings, Husayn said, “This is just the beginning, my love.”

  About The Open Door by Marilyn Booth

  When Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal for Egypt on July 26, 1956, the Arab world heralded him as a hero, and globally he became a celebrated symbol of resistance to the European imperialist march that had for so long forcibly shaped the lives of so many. The moment marked a period of consolidation and triumph for ‘Abd al-Nasser’s regime, and it ended a decade of turbulent political activity in an Egypt that was trying to free itself of both British oversight and the political system of the past. As much as it was a decade of struggle, of disillusionment and hardship, it was also a decade of youth activism and of popular optimism about the future of a newly independent country. And it is the decade that Latifa al-Zayyat chronicles in her classic, first novel, The Open Door. Published in 1960, the novel appeared as that earlier optimism was wearing off, after a period in which ‘Abd al-Nasser’s regime had imprisoned many of its opponents and had strictly curtailed freedom of expression and the right to organize. Significant and crucial strides made in land reform were, if not wholly offset by, at least tempered by, a sense of drift and uncertainty. Yet the memory of recent triumphs was still fresh, and a young generation grappling with its collective identity welcomed what was a bold and innovative literary work. Like Egyptian men, Egyptian women had been writing and publishing fiction since before the turn of the twentieth century. But to confront issues of personal freedom and sexuality in the context of received social expectations and the constraints of political inertia, economic travail, and class—and to do so as a woman writing about female experience—was new and shocking, no less so than the bold step of describing the physicality of male and female adolescent and post-adolescent sexual awakening, as al-Zayyat does in this novel. A later generation of writing women remembers reading—or hearing about—The Open Door as a formative experience. Remarked novelist Hala Badri in a reminiscence (al-Bahrawi, ed., 1996) offered to a conference on al-Zayyat held shortly before her death in 1996:

  In my childhood, the name ‘Latifa al-Zayyat’ echoed around me as one of the icons of national liberation. The great writer remained in my imagination merely a name, until the film version of The Open Door came out. Our home witnessed many conversations about the boldness of its themes. The adults re-read the novel . . . and began to discuss it. What arrested them was not the point that choosing the way one lives privately is inseparable from public commitment, but rather the courageous conclusions that emerge through the dialogues. For conversations between the heroine and her female cousin hint that a woman’s body becomes parched when her relationship with a man is unsatisfying. This might appear obvious to us now, but at that time it was startling and provocative. The women around me were quietly thankful to this woman who had been able to express an experience that they could not articulate out loud though it was common among them. Thus, The Open Door did not simply broach a single signification; it sparked heated debate in many homes, among them mine—just an ordinary home in Cairo.

  Al-Zayyat’s novel was one of a few novels by Arab women that appeared around the same time, landmark works such as the Lebanese writer Layla al-Ba‘albaki’s novel I Live, that heralded the present explosion of feminist writing in the Arab world and the entry of female Arab writers into the modern literary canon. Because this entry remains unfamiliar to most outside the Arab world, it is worth tracing that history at the risk of repeating what close observers know.

  Referring to a body of literature and other creative arts that is recognized as emblematic of the dominant ideology, values, and organization of social forces in a given society, a canon is thus inseparable from—indeed, it is often central to—struggles over political power and economic and social processes and structures. Thus, a canon is also a vision of ‘the way things ought to be’ that constructs an image of the society’s past as perfect, as an ideal. A canon cannot be a fixed entity but rather is a process, a site of struggle over the power to name what is central to cultural and political definition. The canon of Arabic literature in the twentieth century, like that of any literature, is always subject to pressure and always in re-formation (as is the way Arabic literature is inserted into ‘world literature’ by Euro/American publishers and critics). As a shifting body of texts, a canon can be usefully examined by looking at its margins (which are also unstable). Literary marginality is of course bound up in social and political marginalization. Women writers have had to fight their marginality—their marginalization—but they have also used marginality as a privileged position, one that widens their gaze and the modes of expression available to them. Ironically, as marginalization along both gender and class lines has come increasingly to shape texts by contemporary women fiction writers, those writers have themselves become more accepted as part of the ‘mainstream’ canon.

  In her autobiographical meditation, Hamlat taftish: awraq shakhsiya (Operation Search: Personal Papers, 1992), the Egyptian fiction writer, political activist, and literary scholar Latifa al-Zayyat (1923–96) presents her childhood in the Delta cities of Dimyat (Damietta) and Mansura as an entry point into a dynamic of withdrawal versus engagement that she sees as marking her adult life. The rooftops of her childhood homes take on complex symbolic meaning: mysterious because they are initially unattainable, they become sites of desire, refuges, places of imagined freedom from the constraints of a socialized existence. In al-Zayyat’s first home, the stairs leading to the roof are inhabited by a snake that will not succumb to the snake-charmers the family engages; the snake also serves as a socializing force, scaring the children away from the freedom of the roof. In her second home, though, the rooftop becomes attainable, if furtively, and the little room perched on top is a place available for childhood meditation. In this context, the author constructs a remarkable image: her seven-year-old self, sitting crouched on the floor against the wall in that little rooftop room. The object of her contemplation is a young poet, in his late twenties, who sits at a desk, lost in thought, oblivious to her presence, for when his meditation is disrupted, he is startled to find her there.

  Young Latifa al-Zayyat, future writer of a landmark work of fiction, gazes from the margins of the room to the man, the poet, at its center. Sitting above her, he is the sign of centrality, of ‘high’ literature, the scion of a l
ongstanding tradition of poetic composition. The author refers to him as al-Sha‘ir al-Hamshari: this is Muhammad ‘Abd al-Mu‘ti al-Hamshari (1908–38). As a romantic poet in the thirties, this poet was also representative of ways in which social notions of the literary were being turned inside out, for the poetic art he practiced constituted a sharp break with the neoclassical poetry that had long held sway. But from the vantage point of young Latifa, he was the marker of literariness and of a kind of absolute value. True to the history of European romanticism, and like several other Arab romantic poets of the time, al-Hamshari would die young, as the adolescent al-Zayyat finds out, several years later, from her older brother.

  Al-Zayyat situates this childhood incident in the rooftop room as a time of innocence, presaging her awakening realization of the presence of tragedy, unfairness, and evil in the world in which she lives—a shadow embodied in the poet’s early death. But she also situates it as a trope of connectedness and relation: her seven-year-old self contemplates the self-absorbed poet, in total silence, as a way of contemplating herself, a way of searching for a sense of completion, a groping for identity and meaning through loving connection with others. This image offers an entry point into al-Zayyat’s writing, and indeed into a history of women’s writing in modern Egypt. For the author gestures to the process of forming a female identity when she sketches the silent, admiring seven-year-old in her rooftop refuge, a little girl whom the reader knows will become a leader in the student movement of the 1940s, a committed lifelong activist in cultural–political struggle, a noted professor, and an innovative writer of fiction, autobiography, and criticism. This image, the little girl on the margins gazing at the man poet who holds his words inside, not making them available to her, is juxtaposed with that of the author’s mother as storyteller. Al-Zayyat recalls being simultaneously frightened and fascinated as her mother related to her the real-life tale of Rayya and Sakina, a pair of female serial killers in 1920s Alexandria whose story generated an outpouring of popular narratives at the time. Al-Zayyat stresses that it was the narrative itself, the realness of it, that attracted her, not its moral. Her mother’s narration is further contrasted with the products of mass culture, as al-Zayyat recalls seeing the movie version of Rayya and Sakina years later—and remaining unmoved.

  While al-Zayyat makes no reference in any of this to her own writing career, she situates her own writing and a history of women writing through the implicit contrast between the poet on the rooftop and the storytelling mother to whom a frightened little girl comes for comfort in the night, between the romantic poet in quiet isolation and the popular narrative centering on female anti-heroes—between, finally, different languages and worlds. The image echoes against an autobiographical image of childhood evoked by the poet ‘A’isha Taymur (1840–1902) in the preface to a fictional tale (al-Taimuriyya, 1990) written nearly forty years before al-Zayyat was born:

  Says the one with the broken wing, Aisha Ismat daughter of Ismail Pasha Taimur: Ever since my cradle cushion was rolled up, and my foot roved the carpet of the world, ever since I became aware of where enticements and reason dwelt for me, and I grew conscious of the inviolable space around my father and grandfather—ever since that time, my fledgling aim was to nurse eagerly on tales of the nations of old. I aged while still young trying to get to the root of the words of those who have gone before. I used to be infatuated with the evening chatter of the elderly women, wanting to listen to the choicest stories. . . .

  When my mental faculties were prepared for learning, and my powers of understanding had reached a state of receptivity, there came to me the mistress of compassion and probity, the treasurehouse of knowledge and wonders that amaze—my mother, may God protect her with His grace and forgiveness. Bearing the instruments of embroidery and weaving, she began to work seriously on my education, striving to instill in me cleverness and comprehension. But I was incapable of learning, and I had no desire or readiness to become refined in the occupations of women. I used to flee from her as the prey escapes the net, rushing headlong into the assemblages of writers, with no sense of embarrassment.

  Little ‘A’isha tries to find a secluded spot in which to write, where the screeching of the pen (her favorite sound) will not draw a rebuke. If Taymur and al-Zayyat were generations apart, both had to struggle to make space, psychic and social, for their writing; and for both, the oral narratives of women family members were an early inspiration, and an image contrasting with that of the isolated writer in a tower (or in a rooftop room). The woman as storyteller, bringing together a community and shaping its history against an official, written history, would become a consistent motif in writings by women in Egypt. The first short-story collection by a woman to be published in Egypt was Suhayr al-Qalamawi’s (b. 1911) collection Ahadith jaddati (My Grandmother’s Tales, Cairo, 1935). Al-Qalamawi bases the whole structure and narrative rhythm of this collection on the same traditional female social role that al-Zayyat portrays her mother as enacting and that Taymur constructs: that of preserver and renewer of community history through oral narrative, a trope that saturates the contemporary scene. As a grandmother reminisces about the good old days to her granddaughter, in the gentle generational conflict that emerges al-Qalamawi offers a social critique and an oblique vision of wartime from the perspective of those who stayed home. This was in line with most of the fiction appearing in Egypt in the 1930s, comprising critical realist depictions of middle-class Egyptian society and, through middle-class eyes, peasant society. Since the turn of the century, fiction had gradually become established as a respectable literary practice, indeed an indispensable one for a society in the throes of resistance to a colonial presence and reorientation toward an independent future. Fiction’s fortunes were enhanced by a lively non-official press, which welcomed short stories and serialized novels along with poetry and nonfiction. Aspiring fiction writers got practice by translating and adapting European works of fiction, often loosely, for the press and for publishing houses. Most of these writers were men, and as fiction writing developed in sophistication and acceptance through the first half of the century, it was the names of men that occupied central positions in an evolving canon of fictional writing: Muhammad and Mahmud Taymur, Tahir Lashin, Yahya Haqqi, Yusuf Idris, Naguib Mahfouz, and others. But women had started to write and publish fiction around the same time. Mostly ignored by critics, they published in the growing number of women’s magazines that began to appear in the 1890s, and also in some mainstream magazines like al-Hilal. Labiba Hashim (1880–1947), a Lebanese immigrant to Egypt, published ‘story-essays’ in the early women’s press, including her own magazine, Fatat al-sharq (1906). These are

  quasi-fictional presentations of characters and situations interwoven with expository prose; the narrative ‘proves’ the point of the essay. Hashim published arabizations of European works and tried her hand at writing fully formed short stories, as well as producing polemics on women’s education and emancipation. Another immigrant from the Lebanon, Zaynab Fawwaz (c.1850–1914), published a play and an historical novel around the turn of the century while contributing essays and poetry to the press. In attempting this variety of literary practices, Hashim and Fawwaz were writers of their time.

  While finding and creating outlets in the press, Hashim and other women published books. Between 1900 and 1925, thirty-one Arab women authors published at least sixty-two volumes in Arabic in Egypt. Of course, this is a tiny number compared to the publishing output of men, and most of these authors, with the exception of another Lebanese immigrant, Mayy Ziyada (1886–1941), never achieved canonical status. As time went on, women tended to concentrate on short-story writing while men turned to the novel, as Hilary Kilpatrick (1985) has noted. Perhaps this was partly because short-story writing could more easily be fitted in with women’s other duties—a factor that women writing today in Egypt have indicated as significant to their own careers. But this concentration on the short story may have also had an impact on the status of
these women as writers, or perhaps it is the other way around: for the novel was seen as the more worthy genre, both in terms of the literary skill it required and in terms of the comprehensive social vision it could offer.

  So when al-Qalamawi published My Grandmother’s Tales, at least two generations of publishing women had preceded her. But, again with the exception of the essayist and prose poet Mayy Ziyada, the visibility of the women who had published had been very restricted, limited by the relative marginality of the outlets in which they published; by the inability, dictated by social practice, to maintain any kind of public intellectual presence; and by a general lack of critical attention. By the 1930s, as notions about women’s status in society were slowly shifting—in tandem and sometimes in tension with nationalist ideologies and programs—women could participate more visibly in cultural production. Al-Qalamawi’s work came at a time when textual and social visibility, fought for by early feminists and pro-feminist nationalists, was becoming more possible. She used this new space, paradoxically, to articulate the private world of upper- and middle-class women at the turn of the century. This strategy offered a social critique that differed from that of contemporary men writers. It was a critique founded in what some critics have seen as characteristic of women’s writing, a ‘dailiness’ that captures the everyday, supposedly trivial but in fact fundamental events that shape us. This characteristic, and an emotionalism that is seen to accompany it, have often been used to dismiss writing by women and to deny it a place in the canon, on the basis that this writing deals with what is ‘unimportant.’ Al-Qalamawi’s book in fact had the benefit of an introduction by the noted litterateur Taha Husayn (1889–1973), who was her professor as she worked toward the first MA to be earned by a woman in an Egyptian university. Even as Husayn praises the work, the nature of his praise has the effect of relegating the work to a certain sphere. He delights in what he calls the work’s “sweet ingenuousness,” which begins, he says, “with the first sentence.” ‘Feminine’ and ‘naive’ are equated.