The Open Door
Page 37
Al-Zayyat—like al-Sharqawi, a member of the leftist intelligentsia of this period—employs the colloquial differently, grounding in it a portrayal not of peasants or proletarians—those ‘others’—but of a petit bourgeois intelligentsia and the remnants of a Turkish aristocracy, her own social group. Furthermore, she uses colloquial not only in the dialogue but also for internal monologue and indirect free discourse, thus going further than even al-Sharqawi. And this dominance of the colloquial enhances al-Zayyat’s portrayal of the mundane, of the everyday as a political arena, more specifically of the interrelationships between the gendering of expectations and behavior on the one hand, and the politics of national liberation on the other. It seems to me that this deployment of language can be seen as a feminist act, as basic to al-Zayyat’s production of what is unquestionably a feminist text in its assumptions, its authorial stance, as well as in its subject matter. In its very structure and language, the novel questions the culture’s consignment to the margins of, first, female experience and articulation; second, the mundane as literary subject; and third, the language that is the medium of everyday experience. And her colloquial is lively, precise, female: characters emerge in their choice of expression. Layla’s mother betrays her allegiance to received behavior patterns through her choice of expressions and proverbs, which her children mimic satirically, and which contrast utterly with the dry, self-satisfied stiltedness of Dr. Ramzi. Gamila and her mother betray their aspirations as they hover between the French loanwords that label coveted things and their own social and linguistic antecedents; that wealth is not matched by social finesse in Gamila’s fiancé is hilariously evident in his language. Al-Zayyat draws close to colloquial poets of the time and earlier as she beautifully and precisely catches not only the phrases but the pronunciation of different social groups. And, to my knowledge, no writer in Arabic before or since has captured middle-class adolescent girlhood so precisely through its own rhythms as al-Zayyat does here, dramatizing the story’s conflicts in the three-way conversations among ‘Adila, Layla, and Sanaa. The power of the vernacular in al-Zayyat’s hands is a strength of the work that the translator can only imperfectly convey. And part of this power has to do with the naming practices of everyday life and language. When al-Zayyat refers to Layla’s mother and aunt as Umm Layla and Umm Gamila (‘Mother of Layla,’ ‘Mother of Gamila’) rather than as Saniya and Samira, is she deploying description to remind us of how Layla is enmeshed in family, a closely woven net of relationships that she must navigate as she struggles to name her own experience? At the time, in this conservative middle-class environment as well as among working-class and peasant families, parents were often named after their children, and known to acquaintances as ‘Father of . . . ’ or ‘Mother of . . . .’ Furthermore, in a society where the expected label would be to call these women after their sons (thus, Umm Mahmud and Umm ‘Isam), is al-Zayyat deliberately replacing this practice with a female genealogy?
The Open Door was nominated for a state prize, a nomination upheld by a unanimous vote of the state-appointed committee, according to al-Zayyat. But the writer and literary arbiter ‘Abbas al-‘Aqqad (1889–1964), in his capacity as a permanent member of the Higher Council on the Arts and Letters, threatened to resign unless the prize were rescinded. And the prize was withdrawn, on the basis that al-Zayyat had been “immoderate in [her] use of the colloquial.” Perhaps this was an indication of how new al-Zayyat’s use of language in The Open Door was on the Egyptian literary scene, a novelty she herself has commented on.
Since the days of The Open Door, the literary scene has shifted, and opened up. The past thirty years have been a period of great experimentation in every genre, of large strides in critical work, of an enormous expansion in governmental and non-governmental literary publishing, of the founding of important literary journals. Of course, within that period there have been times of relative literary quiescence, such as the time just after the 1967 war, a time of deep political–personal crisis for the intelligentsia that left many writers silent for years. Writers have also had to contend with a great deal of formal and informal censorship, to this day. Repression and political crisis have not stopped them, of course. The self-examination sparked by 1967, for example, helped to fertilize a tremendous creative ferment in the 1970s, in poetry, fiction, and drama alike. In fiction, writers had by and large left the fold of social realism in favor of a literary expression that focused more on inner formulations of identity and the fragmentary, self-contradictory subjectivity of characters, expressed through a more impressionistic and fragmented kind of narrative. Some experimented with forms, images, and themes drawn from ‘the heritage’—medieval Islamic, pharaonic, Coptic, folkloric. Some tried their hands at new kinds of historical fiction, crafting styles that echoed and subverted those of the chroniclers of medieval Arab societies. Some took on the voice of the traditional storyteller or ballad singer. In fact, the prominent novelist and critic Edwar al-Kharrat has linked modernist and postmodernist Arabic literature to “a whole legacy of Arab culture,” challenging the prevailing academic tendency of past decades (among both Arab and Euro/American academics) to define and periodicize the history of modern Arabic fiction according to categories of Euro/American experience.
Searching for their own literary voices, women and men writers of the 1970s and 1980s shaped the language in new ways. For one thing, no longer was the division between linguistic registers—‘classical’ or ‘modern standard’ Arabic versus the colloquial—conceived as impermeable. The notion of what might be considered canonical opened up. Among other things, this meant a reevaluation of many works by women that had been previously dismissed or ignored—similar to the reevaluation by feminist critics that has gone on in the realms of European and North American literatures. In particular, contemporary women writers began to regard themselves consciously as part of an historically continuing tradition of women writers. Women writers in Egypt, along with many men writers, are concerned with deconstructing rather than abandoning the dominant tradition. Women writers have certainly demonstrated an active, probing, subversive relationship to that tradition, questioning the privileging of any one position as the position of truth by, for example, rewriting established works from a differently gendered perspective.
If al-Zayyat’s articulation of marginality, in both The Open Door and Operation Search, is not primarily one of class (marginalization through class position, as well as gender, is represented by a secondary character, Sayyida, the servant who is exploited sexually by Layla’s first love), the double marginalization of class and gender, with its multiplier effects, is there. Al-Zayyat produced for her time a counterhegemonic discourse, one that tries to make possible a new way of seeing things, a new way of acting, by taking the margins of social existence and articulation as centers. Thus, we return to the image of the seven-year-old girl, crouched on the floor, silent, gazing at the man poet, the representative of all that is literary. But the seven-year-old next to the wall would find a voice; she would question the center, literarily and politically; she would mount her own search campaign in further novels, an autobiographical text, and in drama. The seven-year-old on the roof would participate in opening out the horizons of Arabic literary practice.
As Hala Badri suggested in the comment quoted above, what was startling and bold when The Open Door—novel and movie—emerged may be obvious now, for the transformations in girls’ and women’s lives that al-Zayyat and others struggled to institute then have become part of contemporary history. And the intensely melodramatic quality of the text may temper its power for readers of the new millennium. Yet we should not dismiss this novel. It was an historically important event; it remains a timely literary work. For in an environment of increasing conservatism, in a global situation where women’s rights to choose their own futures become touchstones for issues of all sorts, those transformations begin to look tenuous, and the social and political struggles that al-Zayyat and other independent-minded, cour
ageous writers have made part of their fictional worlds are indeed not entirely a thing of the past.
I am indebted to the following sources, which also offer further background to the interested reader:
Ahmed Abdalla, The Student Movement and National Politics in Egypt 1923-1973 (London: Al Saqi Books, 1985).
Sayyid al-Bahrawi, ed., Latifa al-Zayyat: al-adab wa’l-watan (Cairo: Nur: Dar al-Mar’a al-Arabiya, Markaz al-Buhuth al-Arabiya, 1996).
Joel Beinin and Zachary Lockman, Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Communism, Islam, and the Egyptian Working Class, 1882–1954 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987).
Jacques Berque, Egypt: Imperialism and Revolution, trans. Jean Stewart (New York and Washington: Praeger, 1972).
Marilyn Booth, “Introduction,” in Marilyn Booth, ed. and trans., My Grandmother’s Cactus: Stories by Egyptian Women (London: Quartet Books, 1991).
———, “Latifa al-Zayyat,” Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature, ed. J. S. Meisami and Paul Starkey (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 2: 825.
William L. Cleveland, A History of the Modern Middle East (Boulder, San Francisco, and Oxford: Westview Press, 1994).
Miriam Cooke, War’s Other Voices: Women Writers on the Lebanese Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (Cambridge: Belknap, 1991).
Hilary Kilpatrick, “Women and Literature in the Arab World: The Arab East,” in Mineke Schipper, ed., Unheard Words: Women and Literature in Africa, the Arab World, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America, trans. by Barbara P. Fasting (London: Allison and Busby, 1985).
———, “The Egyptian Novel from Zaynab to 1980,” in M. M. Badawi, ed., Modern Arabic Literature [Cambridge History of Arabic Literature vol. 4] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
Hiba Sharif, “al-Bab al-maftuh,”Hagar: Kitab al-Mar’a 1 (1993): 134–43.
Aisha Ismat al-Taimuriyya, “Introduction to the Results of Circumstances in Words and Deeds,” trans. Marilyn Booth, in Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke, eds., Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990).
Latifa al-Zayyat, Hamlat taftish: awraq shakhsiya (Cairo: Kitab al-Hilal, 1992).
Translator’s Acknowledgments
I WANT TO THANK FERIAL GHAZOUL for urging me to embark on this translation; Neil Hewison, Pauline Wickham, and Aleya Serour at the AUC Press for their forbearance, professionalism, fine work, and good humor; Mandy McClure for her fine editing; Joel Beinin for filling in a few historical details; and Sahar Tawfiq and Sharif Elmusa for some felicitous phrasing.
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
About The Open Door
Translator’s Acknowledgments
Selected Hoopoe Titles