Feminist critics the world over have been reevaluating and valorizing these very characteristics—triviality, simplicity, primacy of emotion, dailiness—as Miriam Cooke (1988) has done with regard to Lebanese women writers of the Lebanese civil war period. Al-Qalamawi’s short stories, never accepted by critics as a central work of Arabic literature, in fact constituted a new and important, experimental, addition to the literature of realist social critique in Egypt.
Two decades later, as more and more women and men were publishing fiction, Latifa al-Zayyat began work on The Open Door. It was a moment when writers who had become part of the canon of modern Arabic literature, like Naguib Mahfouz and Yusuf Idris, were bringing what is usually labeled an Arabic realist tradition of social critique to its height, to a point where in the case of Mahfouz, for example, this approach had been so fully explored that he would feel the need to turn in new directions. Sakina Fu’ad, Asma’ Halim, Sophie Abdullah, and others were working within this fold to explore the constraints and possibilities specific to women’s lives in Egypt at mid-century. Al-Zayyat’s novel, which on the surface of it seems to participate fully and unequivocally in a realist approach to social critique, pointed to some of the ways in which the Arabic novel would develop away from that approach. The Open Door did so by privileging and interweaving two kinds of marginality, one social and one literary: the first, putting a female perspective at the center, within a context of family and community; the second, using everyday rather than literary diction. Many other Egyptian writers had been experimenting with the use of an Egyptian colloquial Arabic in writing dialogue; for some time, the vernacular’s status as a literary language had been an issue among the intelligentsia. Yet al-Zayyat’s use of it may have contributed to the fact that The Open Door was denied recognition as a major achievement in Arabic literature in a formal and graphic sense noted below.
Born in 1923 in the Delta town of Dimyat, Latifa al-Zayyat was a generation older than her protagonist, Layla. Layla witnesses and participates in the 1946 demonstrations as a middle-school student; her creator was one of the university student leaders at that time, active in the National Committee of Workers and Students, elected its secretary. Al-Zayyat earned her doctorate in 1957 and went on to become a revered and inspiring professor of English literary criticism at ‘Ayn Shams University in Cairo. She also served as Director of the Arts Academy in the early 1970s. She was president of the Committee to Defend National Culture, which she helped to found in 1979 with other intellectuals concerned about the impact of the Camp David accords on Egyptian society and culture. She was active in many cultural organizations and women’s organizations, and wrote magazine columns on gender issues for the popular magazine Hawwa’. She published many books and articles on literary criticism; although she was silent as a fiction writer for many years after The Open Door appeared, she resumed her activity in that sphere and published a short-story collection in 1986, al-Shaykhukha wa-qisas ukhra: majmu‘a qisasiya (Old Age and Other Stories: A Short Story Collection), followed by two novels and a play (al-Rajul alladhi ‘arafa tuhmatahu: riwaya qasira [The Man Aware of his Accusation: A Novella], published in the journal Adab wa-naqd in 1991 and as a book in 1995; Sahib al-bayt: riwaya [Owner of the House: A Novel], 1994; Bay‘ wa-shira’: masrahiya [Purchase and Sale: A Play], 1994). She published her acclaimed, innovative autobiographical work in 1992. She was awarded the State Prize for Literature in 1996.
In her life and commitment, al-Zayyat was at the center of her country’s struggle. And to appreciate this novel’s intertwining of the public and the personal, one must have an understanding of the political events that surround and infuse it. The novel opens with the dramatic and violently-met mass demonstrations of February 21, 1946.
Egypt was still reeling economically from World War II, in which German and British (and British colonial) soldiers had marched and fought on Egyptian soil; British and Australian soldiers investigating Cairo’s pleasures had not endeared themselves to the populace. There was strong resentment of Britain’s continued hold over Egypt; having announced a nominal independence in 1923, after some forty years of occupation, London retained for itself the right to dictate financial organization, to station troops and control Egypt’s military, and to control the Suez Canal. Negotiations for a true independence had resulted in the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty, hardly an improvement. Power was deadlocked among the Palace, where the scion of the Turkish dynasty founded early in the nineteenth century by Muhammad Ali held sway; the British Ambassador; and the Egyptian Parliament, where the two major parties locked horns. The Wafd (or Delegation), formed after World War I to demand self-determination from the Great Powers, had evolved into a popular mass party, yet had generated as much cynicism as had the Liberal Constitutionalists, the bastion of a landholding elite, for popular perception was quick to notice indications that holding onto power seemed more important to many of its leaders than did the country’s needs—a perception that emerges in this novel through conversations among the residents of no. 3 Ya‘qub Street. During the war, Great Britain’s local representatives had not hesitated to make it clear where true power lay; thus, the fiery students at Cairo University—and elsewhere—held few illusions. Student activism was nothing new for Egypt’s young intelligentsia, as Ahmed Abdalla shows in his history of student activism in Egypt. As the 1930s wore on, both rightist organizations and leftist groupings, including communists, drew support from students, and communist student leaders—female and male—were important in the demonstrations of the 1940s. (Cairo Faculty of Medicine, where Layla’s brother Mahmud and her cousin ‘Isam are enrolled, was one of the centers of activism.) As the novel sketches, this was a generation for which new ideas about social organization and personal freedom were inseparable from political demands—even if, as al-Zayyat trenchantly shows, the young often had difficulty squaring theory and practice. And such ideas, and the activism, trickled down from the universities to Cairo’s secondary schools; Khedive Isma‘il School, a site in the novel, was known as a center of student activism (Abdalla, 55), and the authorities worried about pre-university students on the rampage. These young and enthusiastic forces swelled the numbers of popular demonstrations into the impressive thousands. Early in 1946 public anger seemed on the upswing, and in the second week of February thousands of students held a meeting at which they called for abrogation of the 1936 Treaty and a stop to continued negotiations. They called for a general strike, and the date set was February 21. On that day—as Chapter One describes—when four armored British cars rolled past the British Qasr al-Nil barracks and plowed into the Isma‘iliya (now Liberation) Square demonstrations in downtown Cairo, the throngs answered by bodily attacking the armored cars and setting them on fire.
Isma‘il Sidqi, remembered as the repressive prime minister of the 1930s (1930–33), had been summoned back into power just before this mass show of public protest; it is his measures that the patriarch at no. 3 Ya‘qub Street in the old, middle-class neighborhood of Sayyida Zaynab (named for one of Cairo’s major shrines, to the Prophet Muhammad’s granddaughter) fears. Sidqi Pasha resumed negotiations with the British, as he had leaders of popular protest arrested and proved himself—once again—no friend to industrial workers and their attempts to organize. This unpopular prime minister represented for many the reactionary stranglehold of the old aristocracy; it seems no accident that al-Zayyat names her young, upper-class male anti-hero ‘Sidqi.’
Sidqi’s negotiations, like those of past decades, failed; one major reason was Britain’s reluctance to let go of a strategic presence in Egypt. Though British troops withdrew from Cairo and the Delta, they remained in the Canal Zone, and hence that region took on symbolic as well as practical importance in the resistance to neo-colonialism. In 1951, after Sidqi’s successor did abrogate the 1936 treaty, volunteer commandos and British troops skirmished in the Zone. In Cairo—as we see in the novel—the university becomes a recruiting ground and a training camp where, according to A
bdalla, 10,000 students were trained in military maneuvers, and student battalions began to leave for the Canal Zone in November. There, they joined others—industrial workers, the union of Suez Canal workers, military officers, peasants—and al-Zayyat’s portrayal of this resistance as badly provisioned and lacking support from the government is historically accurate. Yet the resistance incurred British response. In January, 1952, the British attacked an Egyptian police barracks at Isma‘iliya (on the Canal), believing that Egyptian police were taking part in the resistance there. Cairo erupted as the news came that fifty Egyptians had died. As policemen and firemen looked on in passive solidarity, crowds set fire to institutions and neighborhoods affiliated with the British presence in what became known as the Cairo Fire and Black Saturday (January 26, 1952). The fire also consumed commercial establishments—like Cicurel, the exclusive department store where Layla’s cousin Gamila shops for her trousseau—associated with Europeans or those perceived as Europeanized locals (les Grands Magasins Cicurel et Oreco was owned by a prominent Cairo family of Jewish Egyptians, and twice rebuilt by the Egyptian government). This event and the ensuing declaration of martial law and harsh repression of all popular resistance stripped the monarchy of any remaining moral authority, and may have hastened the July Revolution of that year, in which the Free Officers assumed power. King Faruq was made to abdicate and to sail from Alexandria three days after the coup, as the populace—and al-Zayyat’s fictional personae—celebrated.
But the end of the ancien régime did not mean the end of the British presence. More negotiations resulted in a 1954 agreement stipulating the withdrawal within twenty months of British forces from their base at the Suez Canal, and indeed they were gone in April of 1956. But then a new drama began. Maneuvering between the imperative of acquiring massive aid for arms and for development on the one hand, and the imperative of maintaining independence from Western financial and political institutions on the other, ‘Abd al-Nasser was deciding whether to accept the conditions for a British- and US-financed project to build the Aswan High Dam when the US pulled out. In “a dramatic act of defiance,” as William Cleveland puts it, ‘Abd al-Nasser announced the nationalization of the Suez Canal, explaining that its revenues would go to projects that Western governments were unwilling to finance. Non-aligned governments and populations applauded the move as a signal of independence from the Great Powers, who were not at all pleased by ‘Abd al-Nasser’s move. As negotiations were mounted to find a way out, a secret agreement among Britain, France, and Israel, who all had their own reasons to oppose ‘Abd al-Nasser, resulted in an Israeli strike into Sinai on October 29, 1956, followed by a wave of British bombing two days later, and then by British and French paratroop landings in Port Said (November 5) and an advance on Suez City—events that bring The Open Door to a close. The next day, a United Nations ceasefire marked the end of that advance, as US troops moved in and the British and French—and eventually the Israelis—withdrew. Although this was not a military victory for Egypt, it was a political victory for ‘Abd al-Nasser and a defining moment for the nation.
The Open Door chronicles the political and sexual coming-to-awareness of a middle-class girl in the Egyptian provinces. Al-Zayyat has called it an attempt to capture her own vision of the world as she was growing into adulthood. The main character, Layla, is ten years younger than al-Zayyat would have been as the political events that mark the story unfold. Layla’s growth is paralleled by that of the broad-based nationalist resistance to continued British control over the reins of government through the thirties and forties, despite Egypt’s nominal 1923 independence. As Hiba Sharif has noted in an essay on this novel, every advance or retreat in the political realm is matched by one in Layla’s personal realm and vice versa—one realm does not precede the other (though, as Hilary Kilpatrick (1992) has noted astutely, some key political events of the time—the war of 1948—are ignored, perhaps because they do not fit into the scheme of Layla’s own development). Through the structure of her novel, al-Zayyat suggests an intimate and inseparable relation between personal liberation and the political freedom of self-determination. Sketching the lives of middle-class girls in intimate detail, some of which might sound foreign to an Egyptian teenager now (banana sandwiches and forbidden dancing at school; the old kerosene burners that preceded butagaz), she draws on historical references to fill out that struggle. It seems no accident that Layla’s college-student cousin ‘Isam finds her reading Salama Musa (1887–1958) and arguing for his polemics. Not only does this suggest Layla’s precocious intelligence, which her parents would rather ignore, but Musa as cultural symbol signals both a national/ist identity transcending Coptic and Muslim identities and a sympathy for leftist allegiances. Musa was a Copt and a Fabian socialist for whom national allegiance and the issue of independence became paramount. Like many of his contemporaries in the 1920s–30s, he believed in the possibility of adapting Western institutions while retaining local cultural and political autonomy. He was an outspoken proponent of women’s rights and a firm supporter of Egypt’s early feminist movement. He authored a celebrated autobiography and was an influential magazine editor. Layla’s choice of reading matter tells us where her sympathies lie.
But it is another aspect of the novel that I want to emphasize here. In a recent autobiographical essay, al-Zayyat herself says she thinks the novel was a new presence on the literary scene in its emphasis on the construction of dramatic moments, at a time when most novels contained a large amount of external description of scenes, characters, and events. Very much a work of its time in interrogating an ideology of middle-class life, The Open Door diverged in its method of interrogation. The novel is striking for its long passages of dialogue largely unmediated by description. And much of the dialogue seemingly does not contribute to the onward march of the narrative—just one example being an exchange among Layla, her cousin, and her aunt about which cloth to use for an engagement dress and which for the wedding dress. In fact, though, such immediate dramatic moments subtly echo and call to mind the dramas of public life, as they also speak to the importance in consciousness formation of little moments. The novel is woven through the daily conversations of its characters, the ‘small’ as well as the ‘large’ events of mundane existence. Characters have distinctive voices, even in some cases distinctive colloquial idioms, as they would in real life. More often than not, these conversations take place among women without any men around, or with one man, always a family member, present. Like al-Qalamawi’s My Grandmother’s Tales, they successfully place the focus on women’s worlds, and on female perspectives. Many men and fewer women had already given fictional treatment to the question of women’s status in society, of women’s education, marriage practices, and so forth, criticizing received practices and calling for change. But they did so from what might be called an externalized point of view, even when a female character was central to the action.
But as I have noted, there is a further aspect to the primacy of dialogue in The Open Door. Al-Zayyat unabashedly uses a colloquial register—in this case, the spoken Arabic of the urbanized middle classes—in her dialogue. She was not alone in this; the use of colloquial Arabic in fiction, drama, and poetry had been a hot issue among writers since the turn of the century, although the context and direction of the debate differed for each genre. In fiction, some writers had supported the use of the colloquial on the basis that a colloquial register best suited the requirements of a literature of realistic depiction. For others, using the colloquial expressed a political stance, a signal of the author’s populist alignment. But there was fierce opposition to the use of colloquial Arabic in literary expression; many writers saw it as a debased or corrupted tongue, to which they contrasted a supposedly ‘pure’ classical idiom. Political and religious considerations were important: use of the colloquial was variously seen as destructive of an ideal of Arab unity; as culturally divisive; as insulting to the language of the Qur’an. Naguib Mahfouz, for example, has steadfastly
opposed its use, although even he lets colloquial usages creep in now and then.
When al-Zayyat was writing The Open Door in the late 1950s, the first wave of experimentation with colloquial dialogue, in the 1920s and 1930s, had subsided somewhat. And in well-known novels and short stories of that period, for instance Ibrahim ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Mazini’s (1890–1949) Ibrahim al-katib and short stories by the Taymur brothers, use of the colloquial is guarded and uneven. As early as Muhammad Haykal’s Zaynab (1913; often heralded as the first true Arabic novel although it was preceded by several decades of novel writing in Arabic), when peasant or proletarian characters speak or are spoken to, the speech may be couched in a colloquial register. But the educated characters tend to speak in a register of formal speech among or within themselves, especially when articulating what the author sees as a profound thought or a timeless truth.
In the 1950s, al-Zayyat had before her the example of the socialist writer ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Sharqawi (1920–87), author of the much-acclaimed novel al-Ard (The Land, first published serially in 1953), which attempted a representation of peasant resistance to authoritarian regimes of the pre-1952 period. Al-Sharqawi’s use of the colloquial, more sustained than that of previous writers, revolved around his portrayal of peasant society. As Hilary Kilpatrick (1992) has said, “the feel for the violent, aggressive way of speaking characteristic of the peasants is perhaps the single most important factor contributing to the illusion of realism in [The Land].”
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