Lesbian Monsters Might Eat You! Heterosexual Panic in Egyptian Film

In the last article we looked at the film Genoun al-Shabab (c.1975). In that film we had a resident lesbian to whom one of the main characters at one point refers in the masculine pronoun. “Ma lak” instead of “ma lik,” (what’s wrong with you?) asks ‘Alaa when Usmat comes by his house to tell him her girlfriend got married. Usmat is allusively conveyed as masculine in both dress and demeanor and she is also coded as the “active” party in her encounters with the coy Dalia. There is another depiction of a seemingly masculine, hypersexual homo, that’s even less flattering than the one we discussed previously, and its home is 1958.

The film in question belongs to Salah Abu Seif. It is one of his women’s emancipation gems and he directed it in collaboration with the great writer Ihsan Abd al-Qudoos (story) and Naguib Mahfouz (scenario). The trio also gave us another cinematic powerhouse women’s emancipation film Ana Hurra/I Am Free, starring Lubna Abd al-Aziz in 1959. We all know that Naguib Mahfouz is no stranger to same-sex sexuality. The claim is that his Ziqaq al-Middaq/Middaq Alley (1947) was the first Arabic novel to convey homoerotic desire between men. Salah Abu Seif, it seems, was also a little intrigued by the concept, judging by the occasional splatter throughout his filmic career, and culminating in Hamam al-Malatily’s (1973) evident homosexual, Raouf Bey. By the way, in Hamam al-Malatily, Raouf dances himself into perdition to James Brown’s “Like a Sex Machine,” just like the hippies in Genoun al-Shabab do. It’s all James Brown’s fault, you see!

But I digress. In al-Tariq al-Masdud (1958), we follow the story of Faiza (Faten Hamama) whose widowed mother and two sisters make a very decent living by entertaining men of wealth and influence in their home, at the expense of their reputation. Faiza doesn’t want any part of this; for her, integrity and personal honor are paramount. Never are her mother and sisters depicted as fallen women, but rather as women who may have cleverly cultivated personal power for themselves in a social economy that has compelled them to this kind of resort. Needless to say, these women are very well connected. The film accords them respect  and in fact shows that when one of the daughters decides to marry, all the neighbors show up at her wedding, even though they had previously ostracized the household. The implication being that wherever there is free food and music, people will show up, or rather, that money buys societal acceptance – pointing to social falsity and hypocrisy. Faiza soon graduates and attends her first teaching job at an all-girls’ school in the Egyptian reef, where the customs and the people are a little different from the folk she is used to encountering in the city. She must live on campus and thus begins a new chapter in her life.

While there, Faiza comes to discover that an honorable person, who is not willing to do the bidding of the men (and as we shall see, one woman) who desire her, will find herself without allies. She is accused of having a relationship with a twelve year-old boy and in this instance the accusation functions identically to actual guilt, because everyone who ever wanted her and didn’t get what they asked for, was now testifying against her in an ensuing investigation. Faiza goes back to the family home and fortunately for her, her mother and friends are very well connected and with a few phone calls the investigation is called off and her name is cleared. Guided by the archetypal male superhero (a romance novel writer on whom she was initially fixated), Faiza is urged not to relinquish her integrity. In the hasty denouement characteristic of films of this era, she refrains from going down the same path as her mother and sisters, which her growing cynicism and disillusionment were directing her towards, and gets together with the romance novelist (played by the king of suave, Hafeth Mathhar).
Of interest to us in this film are the depictions of a masculine gynophile. From my research into medieval Arabic literature, I know we can trace back descriptions of the masculine, woman-loving-woman to at least one millennial text and another from the eleventh century. Such women were referred to as “al-mutathakirat,” which we can translate as male-acting (where male is synonymous with masculine). There is no such name for the school teacher, Hussniya, but it’s impossible to read her as anything other than a butch lesbian (please dis-attach both the “butch” and the “lesbian” from their historical specificities for a moment and allow them to operate as metaphoric signifiers). Hussniya is referred to as “weird,” and indeed she is, in her effusions about Faiza’s youthful good looks. There can be no doubt that there is more to this than mere homosociality. Let’s take a look at the scene in which she first enters the set (a description follows) where Faiza has just arrived at the school and is being introduced to the other teachers.

Hussniya is the only one wearing a tie and she takes quite a liking to Faiza and kisses her an inappropriate number of times. She tells Faiza that she likes her nightdress and when it is politely offered to her, she declares that she wants to see it on Faiza and that she only wears pyjamas. If that’s not enough, in another scene (see it here), Hussniya wonders what the most beautiful thing about Faiza is. Their colleague remarks that it’s Faiza’s spirit, but Hussniya clarifies that she is referring to that which is tangible and draws the figure of a voluptuous woman with her hands saying that everything about Faiza is beautiful. The scene ends with some man-hating affirmations on her part. More violations of Faiza’s personal space occur in a later scene.

You might know or remember Harry Benshoff’s epic book Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality in Horror Film (1997). I’m bringing it up here because I’d like to catalog Hussniya as a “monster” in this Egyptian film, although she doesn’t appear to be in a closet at all. She seems to be burdened with neither shame nor fear of exposure, and her monstrosity is comical just as it is disturbing. That this happens in the countryside, a world away from the social elites we are used to see depicted as being Westernized, is also remarkable. I’m interested to know to whom was this characterization speaking? To the average movie-goer of the day? Does something so evident as this still classify as subtext? If not, then what are we to do with the current theoretical literature that consistently explains the “gay” (or transgender, see earlier post) away as a metaphor for a nation in crisis, or as really being in reference to women’s liberation narratives?

There was another similar monstrosity to Hussniya in Usmat from Genoun al-Shabab, although she was better dressed, and came with a story line that may invoke some compassion in the traditional viewer. And unlike Usmat (or the women in Nisa’ Bila Rijal), there is no traumatic reason given for Hussniya’s proclivities, she just is what she is: the hyperlibidinal (read as masculine), lesbian predator. I don’t know about you, but when I was a school girl, I had to contend with the heterosexual panic of my peers who were worried about being (visually) devoured by the lesbian predator. I can’t tell you how many times I overheard them express horror and concern that so-and-so may be a lesbian, and that they had seen her stare at them or at their legs. Growing up listening to this diminishes you, and it certainly retarded my ability to develop strong friendships with women. To this day, one of my worst nightmares is to be misconstrued for one of those mythological lesbian objectifiers of women. Latently, I learned to deal with my neurotic fears by voicing them out loud, so that my few women friends and I can laugh together at the insanity that has calcified around my adolescent experience of relentless homophobia. And while we’re at it, just for the record and in case any of them are reading this, those girls in my school were about as sexy to me (and Ms. so-and-so) as a cactus! Ms. so-and-so had the good fortune to move to another school, I stayed and listened to this for a few more years.

*Originally published on December 19, 2015 at: http://samarhabib.com/lesbian-monsters-might-eat-you-heterosexual-panic-in-egyptian-film/  <now discontinued>.

The Parable of a Lost Generation: Hippies and Lesbians in the Sadat Era

Over the past six months, I have been endeavoring on this website to update the work I undertook in Chapter VI of Female Homosexuality in the Middle East. In that chapter, I offered a brief review of homosexuality as it manifested in Egyptian cinema and I reported on the film Genoun al-Shabab/The Madness of Youth, which was directed by Khalil Shawqi. At the time I was writing my book, I had to contend with the difficulties of accessing many of the films, a matter that has since been remedied by the people’s YouTube and other user broadcasting venues. Ten years ago, you would’ve been hard pressed finding a copy of Genoun al-Shabab and in fact my mission to locate a viewable copy failed, despite recruiting the help of a friend in Egypt, as well as scouring all bootleg stores in Western Sydney, which gave me access to gems like Bint Ismaha Mahmood and Quta ‘Ala Nar on VHS. But, nevertheless, I had watched the film in my youth and was evidently moved enough by it at that age to be able to remember broad brush strokes. In 2005, which was the time I prepared chapter VI of the book that would be published two years later, I wrote that: “the only information I can here present is from memory and from a website advertising the sale of an original poster for the movie and as such I cannot engage in a close reading of the film.” In 2005 I mistakenly reported that Salwa, the film’s protagonist (played by Mervat Amin), was the film’s resident homosexual. But in fact, it was Salwa’s friend, Usmat (played by Sana’ Younis) who was. Usmat’s lover, Dalia, who is also the subject of her numerous paintings and her muse, goes on to marry her cousin, which sends Usmat spiraling into a crazed depression, culminating in a suicide that closes the film on what is already a very low note, lamenting Egypt’s lost and under-employed youth in the Sadat era.

There is some contention regarding this film’s release date as well. According to the encyclopedic book, al-Jins fi al-Cinema al-Masriya/Sex in Egyptian Cinema (2009) by Mahmoud Qasem, the film was banned in Egypt in the 1970s and it was not until the “early 80s” that it was released at the Alexandria Film Festival. The film was banned in Egypt ostensibly for its insinuation of drug use and “sex without love” culture. This insinuation centers around the lives of ‘Alaa and his “shilla” (group/gang), in whose world Salwa becomes entangled. ‘Alaa, who is bare-chested for the entire film, advocates a return to a Tarazan-like primitivism by refusing to work and importing with him, from his escapades in Europe, a deliberately misrecognized hippie culture, which is depicted as destroying an already strained fabric of Egyptian society and its newly formed Bourgeois nuclear family. But the film that Khalil Shawqi directed is clearly adapted by a director whose home is in the theater and it labors a significant effort to make its point in artful and avant-garde ways. There is so much going on visually in this film, and its postmodern aesthetic was unfortunately too good for its time. To enter into a detailed analysis of all the elements at play and the breaking of the Arab spring that Sadat’s presidency began to institute, as critiqued by Egypt’s intellectuals and revolutionaries at the time, is beyond the scope of this particular article. We could perhaps revisit this era and gain access to the zeitgeist in another article through the songs and numerous arrests of al-Sheikh Imam and Ahmad Fouad Nijem in the years that followed the six day war.

For now, let’s stay on topic and that is homosexuality in Egyptian cinema. There are not many films that depict same-sex sexual relations between women textually in this context, most are sub-textual and even those which aren’t, seldom give this much space to a lesbian subplot. The film wants you to see Usmat and Dalia as victims, it wants you to sympathize with them. Usmat is a little predatory in her sexuality: even as she is just about to die of heartache over Dalia, she makes sexual advances on her friend Salwa but she is able to control her lust and nothing becomes of it. Salwa, being wholesome, is of course disgusted by this and tells her friend that her feelings (for Dalia) are not normal.
Earlier in the film both Usmat and Dalia speak directly to the camera to explain to us what is implied to be the etiology of their deviant behavior. Usmat was raised in a very poor family of five girls. Her father prostituted them and she swore she would never let a man ever touch her. Dalia, on the other hand, used to share a bed with a poor girl who was the house maid. One night, Dalia’s father raped her while Dalia was sleeping in the same bed. These stories are agonizing and to deny that sexual abuse of this kind is prevalent or that it does not play a role in the instantiation of homosexuality does a disservice to truth. These stories are just as real as the stories of something we might call (for expedience) “innate” homosexual desire that is not produced or conduced by trauma. What is more, such homosexual desire can also coexist within or post a context of sexual abuse, these are not mutually exclusive. But, such stories, because they are the only representations available publicly at such a time and place, further marginalize and misrecognize the multifarious manifestations of homosexuality as a life-long, exclusive practice.

But this is the pop psychology that we have to contend with and it plays to the tune of an earlier cinematic depiction in 1971, in the awful, awful film, al-Mut’a wa al-Athab/Pleasure and Suffering, directed by Niazi Mustafa. In that film, once again, female homosexual desire is the product of a woman traumatized by her father’s lovelessness. Interestingly, however, and in contrast with Mustafa’s film in which the villain is made good by his love, there are no good men in this film. Salwa’s father has a secret lover in Alexandria and treats her and her mother horribly; her cousin who plans to marry her expects from her an unrealistic traditionalism and her lover ‘Alaa’, is, well, an idiot. If only men were better behaved, the film seems to suggest, then the women in it would not be lost.

*Originally published December 12, 2015 at http://samarhabib.com/the-parable-of-the-lost-generation-hippies-and-lesbians-in-the-sadat-era/   now dicontinued.

A Woman’s Closet Is Her Castle: Lesbian Subtext and Corrective Pretext in Women Without Men

Ahmad Jalal wrote the screenplay for Bint al-Basha al-Mudir. Jalal starred alongside Marie Queen and Assia Dagher and the film was produced by their company, Lotus Productions in 1938.  As I have written in an earlier article, this film gives us our first same-sex subtext in Egyptian cinematic history. The actresses involved are real life Lebanese aunt and niece and they were among the founding pioneers of the Egyptian cinema industry.  In 1940, Queeny and Jalal marry and they found a new production company, Jalal Films, and begin to work independently of Dagher. In 1953, after the death of her husband, Queenie hires Youssef Chahine to direct Nisa2 Bila Rijal/Women Without Men. She stars alongside Huda Sultan in a story idea conceived by Ihsan ‘Abd al-Qudoos, who is a prolific writer and who is also responsible for giving Egyptian cinema several of its women’s emancipation screenplays of the 1950s. Most remarkable of these to my mind is the story inspired by the life of the actress, Lubna Abd al-Aziz, who plays the main protagonist in the film Ana Hurra/I Am Free (1959), directed by Salah Abu Seif. The screenplay for Women Without Men was written by Nayrooz ‘Abd il-Malek, himself a prolific screenwriter, who had already at this stage collaborated with Chahine and Queeny on Man of the Nile/Rajul al-Neel (1951) and who also characteristically went on to write controversial screenplays, often about sexuality and non-traditional relationships.

Nisa2 Bila Rijal/Women Without Men has not received any critical attention as far as I know, and it’s for this reason that I wanted to spend some time appreciating and valuing its place in the history of queer Arab cinema. It should be noted that both Bint al-Basha al-Mudir and this film are conceived by men. Youssef Chahine, though not responsible for the story line, would go on to make films in which male homoeroticism receives warm, humanist depictions time and again. We see these honest representations throughout his filmic works and most notably in his semi-autobiographical films: Alexandria Why? (1979); An Egyptian Story (1982); and Alexandria Again and Forever (1989). Chahine really deserves a deep analysis of the homosocial and homoerotic signifiers that are infused throughout his work, for these have been skillfully obviated by both critics and biographers. In his prelude to an interview conducted with Chahine in 1998, Joseph Massad touches on these homoerotic protrusions but interestingly refrains from exploring them in the wonderful interview itself, in which Chahine reveals insight both as a humanist and a devoted Arabist. Perhaps Chahine’s fifty year marriage to Collette Favaudon makes dealing with the homoerotic elements of his work cumbersome or awkward for biographers and analysts, but we would do well to move away from this awkwardness in the future.

There is no women’s equivalent to Chahine’s consistency with homoeroticism, especially in the early stages of Egyptian cinema. Jonoon al-Shabab/Madness of Youth (1980) is perhaps an exception, but as you can see it’s not until 1980 that we get it. There are two iconic scenes in my mind when I think about Women Without Men (1953) that make for very interesting reading. Chahine imbues these scenes with a very rich subtext which is characteristic of his remarkable directorship. The story line of this film is evidently symbolic of the political and cultural turmoil Egypt was experiencing at the end of the second World War. The young and honorable son, Jamal, represents an Egyptian thinking-class yearning for republican freedom (he runs in elections against his own father later on in the film and obviously his name is Jamal; he could be no other than a foil for Jamal Abd al-Nasser). Jamal rejects his father’s corrupt political ways and seemingly aimless aristocratic hedonism – evidently a symbol of the hangover from the Ottoman regency and the British protectorate.

After a heated argument with his father, Jamal takes his wife, Dawlat (whose name is a homphone for the word “country”), and goes to live with his aunt, ‘Iffat. His aunt lives in the Egyptian reef, the rural area, often a symbol for a more authentic Egyptian experience removed from the “westernization” of the urbanized social elites. When he gets there, however, he finds a strictly segregated living system in that household. ‘Iffat has some very strong opinions against men and does not allow her daughters to socialize, see or even think of marrying. No man, with one [seemingly asexual] exception, is allowed to enter ‘Iffat’s household. Of course by the end of the film everyone is going to be heterosexually married, ‘Iffat is asked to shed down the stringency of her traditionalism in favor of a more open society. Obviously this is premonitory of the decade of infitah/openness that would ensue under the Nasser administration. Yes, the old political establishment needs to make way for the new and more honorable blood, the film seems to suggest, but it would not hurt to also update social customs and allow for less stringency in men and women’s associations with each other. The final scene of the film shows us ‘Iffat changing her mind about her no-man policy and quite literally running after and catching up with the moving parade of newlyweds.

But of course in the presence of the homosocial, the homoerotic then becomes a contigency, and the film follows the predictable trajectory of having the deviance corrected through heterosexual unions. There are two scenes that speak an entirely different language than the metaphor of country and tradition. In these scenes there is a language of existent yet unspoken desires, there is a celluloid closet, whose door we began to open in the last article on the convention of cross-dressing in Lahalibo (1949).

In the first of two scenes I am going to share with you, we see Iffat’s oldest and most conservative daughter, Azhaar (almost a homophone for al-Azhar), run after Dawlat who is now lying in bed, smoking a cigarette. Dawlat was frightened by the sight of a cat; it’s not clear why the cat frightens her. Now, Azhaar enters the room holding the offending cat in her arms. She asks her what’s wrong with her and Dawlat says “Nothing, I thought you were someone else.” She goes on to say that “Truth is, we are not as scared as you are,” and wonders why the women in that household are often silent and reserved. Azhaar tenses up and says “We are like this, this is our way of life, our regime is like this,” to which Dawlat replies, “it is enough to drive a person crazy!” She receives no sympathy from Azhaar who abruptly tells her to get used to it. At this point, romantic string music plays, Azhaar releases the luxuriant cat onto Dawlat’s bed and extends her hand to touch Dawlat’s hair, but checks herself before she makes contact and withdraws (later on in the film, Azhaar gets to liberate her own hair and so even this gesture is given a narrative pretext to undo the homoerotic subtext). “You have beautiful hair,” continues Azhaar. “Your hair is pretty too, but why have you done this to it?” is the reply. Azhaar is evidently offended. “We are like this, our regime is like this, this is our way of life,” she says for the second time. Do watch for the sensuous cat, the reluctant hand of repressed desire, the softness of the eyes, the suggestiveness of the bed and Sultan’s languorous lazing.

Some time later in the film, Dawlat has fled this prison and Azhaar has predictably fallen in love with her cousin, Jamal, who is now running for elections against his own father, with the funding help of his wealthy aunt. At this stage her mother and other sister suspect that Azhaar is falling in love. In this scene they come to impress upon her the importance of remaining man-free and the terrible consequences that would ensue should she begin to desire otherwise. Azhaar’s hair in this scene is let loose, she dreams of intimacy and sexual liberation. The lines her mother and sister deliver sound like they are pulled out of a really bad 1950s lesbian pulp novel, written by a man. Oh, hang on a second, that’s exactly what they are! You can’t help but chuckle at the melodrama of the acting, you almost expect the two women to turn into vampire bats who fly out of the window into the darkness… Here are the lines of this scene for viewers who require translation. Predictably, they cast the homosexual vis-a-vis the homosocial as a pathology resultant for women’s traumatic experiences with men. We will see plenty more of these insulting explanations in the years to come.

‘Iffat: We have come to warn and caution you.

Sister: And at the same time we have our eyes on you.

‘Iffat: In spite of my unshakeable trust in you.

Sister: Men are snakes as we have told you.

‘Iffat: Yes, men are all snakes. And the snake who bit me is your father.
[they walk closer]

‘Iffat: The reason I hate men is because of him. He was nothing. I turned him into a human being. The moment he drew his first breath [i.e. as soon as he was in a good position] he tried to kill me in order to obtain what he wanted. I kicked him out of the house like a dog, until he saw his end. From that day I swore that I would defend and protect you [daughters] and to keep you away from the bitter cup I drank from. All men are one kind. A woman in their hand is like a toy, a flower they smell and then discard the second it begins to wilt.

Sister: You are like us, and you have to stay like us always.

‘Iffat: It’s true. We put you in the midst of the fire [by getting her to help her cousin with his election campaign and working closely with him], but don’t let the fire consume you. If anyone tried to draw you in with sweet talk, shake him off with all your strength. Stay like us.

Sister: Stay like us.

‘Iffat: Stronger than fire.

[Walking out]


Iffat: Listen, if I notice anything from Jamal I am going to kick him out like a dog

*Originally published on November 14, 2015 at http://samarhabib.com/a-womans-closet-is-her-castle-subtext-and-pretext-in-women-without-men/  now discontinued.

Notes on Cross-Dressing in Early Egyptian Cinema

In the Spring of 1998, Middle East Report published an article by Garay Menicucci titled “Unlocking the Arab Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in Egyptian Film.” To my knowledge this was the first article to talk about homosexuality in Egyptian film and to nuance it along the same lines argued by Vito Russo in his 1981 book The Celluloid Closet (which was made into an eponymous, must-see documentary by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman in 1995). Menicucci’s was a wonderful oeuvre into the gender and sexual queer of Egyptian cinema. He was the first to unearth Bint al-Basha al-Mudir (1938) as lesbian subtext. He too was the first to bring to critical attention other cross-dressing films like Lil Rijal Faqat (1964), Bint Ismaha Mahmoud (1975), Sukkar Hanim (1960) and al-Anissa Hanafi (1953). Menicucci is no stranger to the Arab world, having lived and worked in Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria. He is able to give us nuanced readings of these films, and is careful not to imbue them with a Western gay and lesbian epistemology, but rather focuses on the use of gender and sexual transgression as products of the thought of progressive, social elites, seeking to unseat traditional marriage and sexuality.

However, the notion of the closet holds steadfast in his analysis. For those of us here who are not specialists, the concept of the Celluloid Closet operates on a standard of subtext. Subtext in this case is when for several reasons — be they cultural or social, or (in the event of censorship) legal or bureaucratic — gender and sexual minority love has to find a way to express itself in heterosexually permissible ways. With the advent of the Hays censorship code in 1930, Hollywood began to rewrite many a screenplay; censors would write out the homosexual or transgender characters all together or at least give them very unhappy, unenviable endings. Therefore, those who wanted to transgress against this implicit and explicit homophobia had to find ways to write homosexuality, to signify it, in code. Among the easiest means available to the screen writer is the plot convention of mistaken identities through cross-dressing. That William Shakespeare used this more than four-hundred years ago is worth mentioning; it is not a new invention. And if one cannot prove that the director or the screenwriter had any intention of exploring same-sex love or desire by exploiting the convention of cross-dressing, then at least we can think of that audience member who either wittingly or unwittingly was being given the closest thing of a representation of their desires as they were ever going to get on screen. I do genuinely believe that some cross-dressing films were imbued with far too much misogyny and resentment for homoeroticism for them to have been intended as transgressions. Among these are Sukkar Hanim or Mamlakat al-Nisa2, for example. In contrast, there is the film al-Anissa Hanafi, in which a biological man (played by Ismael Yassin), undergoes a gender re-assignment surgery and subsequently becomes a woman who is accepted by her neighbors and who marries the local butcher, even becoming pregnant with his offspring. Much of the “comedic” value is at the expense of the “ugly” woman that Ismael Yassin makes, but there is a lot in this film to recommend it as sympathetic.

We might like to take a step back and say “whoa, hold on a minute. You’re telling me this film is pro transgenderism? Transgender identities had not even emerged historically, just yet. Surely, it must be a reflection of a post-war Egyptian sense of emasculation: this is 1953 after all, we’re still not even a whole year into the Nasser revolution.” Let’s just stick with that there was a crisis in Arab male masculinity and this film is about that. We’re more comfortable here, somehow, it makes our scholars feel like they’ve dug in and produced valuable knowledge that proves once again just how very Western and unprecedented all this talk of sexual and/or gender minority identity and rights is. That’s fine with me, I won’t argue with you, but I do think that this film both acknowledges and celebrates (an at least unspecified) gender and sexual diversity, while making a strong case for women’s emancipation.

In one telling scene, Hanafi (whose post-op name is Fifi) is talking to her step sister with whom she is constantly fighting. Moments earlier, Fifi caught her step sister on the rooftop with the local veterinarian who is in love with her and she with him. Fifi wants to prevent her sister from developing a bad reputation and is making demands to keep her from misbehaving in public again, by emphasizing restriction of movement. The following dialogue then ensues:

“Listen, when you were a man….”

“Shut up! I have never been a man, I have always been a mademoiselle.”

“At any rate, it is not shameful for a man to turn into a woman or for a woman to turn into a man. But what is shameful is for the man to be selfish and prevent the girl from getting an education and make her live in a prison like the one we are living in. “

“Why, what are you missing? You don’t eat, you don’t dress up, you’re being starved?”

“Life, my dear, is not just eating, drinking and dressing up.”

“What else is it then?”

“Everyone in this world has to have a purpose and the girl’s purpose is to get an education, so she can prepare herself for the day she is going to be a mother responsible for raising her children.”

Finally, what I want to leave us with today is one cross-dressing film from this fertile period in Egyptian cinematic history that has escaped critical attention. This film was titled Lahalibo and it was released in 1949 and was the film, along with al-3eish w al-Mil7 (1949), that began Na3ima 3akef’s acting career. Na3ima 3akef was an incredibly talented Egyptian acrobat, dancer and actress. Legend has it that she began her performing career at the tender age of four, beginning in the traveling circus founded by her grandfather and now being managed by her father. The story goes that he eventually lost the business to his gambling debts. Another version of events indicates that it was when her father remarried that she was forced to move to Cairo with the rest of her family and to make a living as a street performer before joining an Acrobatic troupe. Eventually, she would become a sensation at Cairo’s prestigious Kit Kat Klub and through her connections there would meet Egyptian director Hussein Fawzi who would give her her filmic Debut in 1949. Fawzi and 3akef signed an exclusive contract and she was the star in at least fifteen of his films. Of the earliest of these was Lahalibo (1949) which may have been written specifically for her.

Lahalibo is a cross-dressing comedy about a young circus and dancing performer, whose parents have died but whose wealthy grandfather wants nothing to do with her because of his hatred for girls. In order to obtain access to him, she disguises herself as his grandson. Thus begins her double-life. One as a performer and the other as the Basha’s handsome grandson. 3akef taught herself how to tap dance and in this scene we see her give us a performance, the visual aesthetics of which are somewhat reminiscent of Marlene Dietrich in Morocco (1930). Mistaken for a man by everyone except her co-performers and the object of her affection, Amir, this scene is a delight to watch. 3akef died of cancer at the very tender age of 37.

*Originally published on November 3 2015 at http://samarhabib.com/notes-on-cross-dressing-in-early-egyptian-cinema/ now discontinued.

The Founding Fathers of Egyptian Cinema Were Mothers

It is a widely known fact that the Egyptian cinema industry is unparalleled in its reach in the Arab world. From the North African reaches to the Arabian Peninsula, no Arab household with access to television has foregone the influence of the Egyptian silver screen of the twentieth century. With our numerous dialects, which are often unintelligible as vernacular vary widely across the expanses covered by the Gulf, the Levant and North Africa, the Arab world has implicitly learned the Egyptian dialect through the ubiquity of great (and sometimes not so great) motion pictures. Thus, Egypt is the star of the Arab world; it has been our political beacon since the 1950s, setting an example of expelling colonial and imperial interests, even if that example was very short-lived and is currently in tatters.
Egypt of the twentieth century also gave us a kind of identitarian cohesion through its popular cultural output. Whether through Oum Kulthum’s highly anticipated and widely televised monthly concerts, or Abd al-Halim’s blockbuster protagonisms or al-Sheikh Imam’s political dissent, Egypt has been telling the story of humanity in Arabic in a way whose reach is incomparable in the twenty-two other Arab nation-states. But while this may be a very unsurprising fact, what is little known is the extent of women’s involvement in founding the Egyptian cinema industry. Despite patriarchal discouragements that seek to inhibit women from pursuing film production, the Egyptian film studio was built by women about whom we do not hear enough.

At a time when there were five production companies making films in Egypt, one of these, Lotus Productions, belonged to the Lebanese-born Assia Dagher, who immigrated to Egypt in the 1920s. Dagher’s career spanned a lifetime of filmic production, and estimates of her output vary. According to Nadia Wassef, in the extremely important documentary ‘Ashiqat al-Cinema al-Masriya Part II, Dagher produced fifty films, whereas Rebecca Hillauer in her equally monumental work, Encyclopedia of Arab Women Filmmakers, claims that Dagher produced over a hundred films.

Alongside her niece Marie Queeny and Ahmad Galal, whom Queeny would later marry, Dagher made films that would define filmmaking for the next generation. Dagher was a shrewd business woman and was even able to survive the Nasser administration’s nationalization of film studios, and pressed on to produce the epic film Al-Nassir Salah Al-Din in 1963, hiring Youssef Chahine as director. Salah Addin cost 120, 000 Egyptian dinars to produce, and as researchers tell us, back then it was the most costly film in Arabic filmmaking history. It is said that the film’s budget was six-times the budget of the average Egyptian film from the period. Dagher preceded this historical epic with her depiction of the legendary Egyptian queen Shajar al-Durr in an eponymous film in 1935. This was the Arab world’s first first historical epic depicted on the silver screen.

But even before Dagher became the giant film producer who would usher in a generation of filmmakers, there was Aziza Amir, who starred in and produced Egypt’s first feature-length film, Leila, in 1927. She founded a production company, Isis, that same year and produced Bint al-Nil (1931) and Bayya’at al-Tuffah (1939). In her doctoral dissertation, “The Plight of Women in Egyptian Cinema…” Marisa Farugia credits Amir with being the first Arab filmmaker to address the Palestinian question in her films Fatat Min Falastine (1948) and Nadya (1949).

Farugia further argues that Bahija Hafez should also be considered as one of the founding pioneers of the Egyptian cinema industry. Hafez founded the Fanar Film Company in 1932, and produced her first feature-length film, al-Dahaya, in 1933. Farugia further illuminates that al-Dahaya was the first Arab film to be subtitled in a foreign language (French). Hafez also wrote, produced and starred in Layla Bint Al-Sahra in 1937, and according to Farugia the film was banned in Egypt and internationally (despite winning the Venice Film Festival in 1938), for its depiction of the 6^th century Persian King, Anusharwan, as a villain.

There can be no doubt, when gleaning over the incredible filmography of these founding mothers that their central preoccupation was to make films about women, films that sought to re-tell and re-envision what it means to be a woman in the Arab world. They lived courageous lives, and pioneered extraordinary accomplishments and yet our school books fail to celebrate them. They gave us what we take for granted, they gave us the feature-length Egyptian film! Dagher, starring alongside her niece, Marie Queeny, also gave us the very first same-sex subtext in Arabic filmic history.

The film in which this occurs tells the story of Hikmat (Dagher), a poor but educated young woman, who is compelled to disguise herself as her brother (who lies ill in a hospital). She must do this in order to take his position as a private tutor for an aristocrat’s younger children, or else face homelessness. Badriya (Queeny), an older child in the family, finds Hikmat-in-disguise extremely attractive. And in this scene she is working hard to seduce “him,” and “he,” at some point, for whatever reason, decides to oblige. Earlier in the film, Badriya sought the advice of Hikmat-as-a-woman on how to seduce a man. Hikmat told her that she should take a flower to him, drop it on the floor and wait until he picks it up. Hikmat thought that Badriya was asking for this advice in relation to her own would-be husband, her cousin Bayouni, and little did she know that Badriya has her sights set on Hikmat-in-disguise. Here it is, a clip from Bint al-Basha al-Mudir, dating back to 1938.

*Originally published on October 6 2015 at http://samarhabib.com/the-founding-fathers-of-egyptian-cinema-were-mothers/ now discontinued.

Shooting from the Lip

“Can I shoot you?” asked a beautiful young woman towering above me in her floral summer dress. Her face was obscured by the heavy light of a hot sun beaming at me from behind her head, as I looked up in surprise at the question.

“Excuse me?” I asked. She sat next to me on the park bench and pulled up an impressive DSLR camera with a not insignificant zoom and said: “you’re photogenic, can I take a picture of you?” People who want to shoot me don’t usually ask my permission, and this tends to involve militants at checkpoints, but I remind myself that the war is over and I’m not there anymore. I’m not feeling particularly photogenic either, I hadn’t brushed my hair or washed my face, I had stayed up all night writing a final paper on Richard the Third, that jerk!

“So, I guess you saw High Art at the movies recently?” I said, I was being a little mean, secretly I was flattered. She caught my drift right away, it was the movie playing in theatres at the time, starring Ally Sheedy and Radha Mitchel, and all of a sudden our campus was overrun with women-loving-women sporting hefty sized cameras, looking to re-enact the sexual tension of an ultimately tragic relationship. 


“No,” she protested, “I’ve been doing this for a very long time.”

“Oh, yeah, since when?”

“Since I was thirteen. My father bought me my first camera. It was a ---” I couldn’t for the life of me pronounce let alone spell the German manufacturer’s name. “My name is Elizabeth, what’s yours?”

I gave her my name and I said that if she wanted to shoot something, it should be interesting. “Do you want to come to my indoor rock climbing gym? I’ll be there all day Saturday.”

“I can’t,” she said, “I have a date with Destiny.”

“Ok, well, now you’re being cryptic.”

“No, seriously. I have a date with a girl, her name is Destiny.”

“Dating is for amateurs,” I said.

“What the hell does that even mean?”  I didn’t reply. I looked meaningfully at my Richard the Third paper and then up at the summer horizon from the park bench. I guess I knew what I meant, but it would take me years to be able to articulate those feelings and thoughts clearly, and by then it was too late to answer her question.

I submit my paper at the English Department office and shuffle off to get some day time sleep. I get to the dorm room and my roommate, Dareen, who hasn’t seen me since I left on Friday afternoon to visit family, rejoices ecstatically at the sight of me.

“Oh my God, thank God, you’re here,” she says, “Karen, Karen, wake up, the homo’s back! We’re starving man, we ran out of food yesterday and we don’t have any money.”

“Oh, yeah, my dad says ‘hi,’ he sent you some bananas, there’s enough calories in those to fuel a walk to the moon,” I said, producing a 500g bag of “banana” lollies that every kid growing up in Sydney of the 1980s and 90s would remember seeing at the local convenience store.

My parents put their life savings together to run this store because by the time they came to Australia no one would hire a highly experience Arabic teacher or public health inspector, both in their fifties. Sometimes I think to myself, maybe if someone was around to help them with their resumes, maybe they could have become employees again somewhere. Instead, they worked 15 hour days, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Like a good Arab kid, I’d go back on the weekends and work there; in high school I’d give them one hour of my time a day in which they could have lunch. At the time it felt like a lot, too much even. I must admit now I could have done much more to help.  

Karen emerged from her stupor to rejoice at the “bananas” being thrown her way.  “We don’t have to go to the Student Union meeting any more, I was going for the sandwiches,” Karen said honestly, in what were to become the final years of Australia’s involuntary student unionism.

I woke up after the sun had set, around 9 p.m. and found myself going for a walk to clear my head for thoughts on what to write for another final paper on the Death of Arthur.  I ran into Elizabeth again, this time she seemed in a hurry. She said they were having an end of semester dress up party in her parents’ home; that I should come, but I shouldn’t judge her because her parents lived in a virtual palace. She said she’d read the communist manifesto in German when she was thirteen. I told her she must have been very busy at that age. Destiny was with her, I scratched my head and I said I wouldn’t know what to come dressed as, looking at the two of them trying really hard to get out of being in a room full of strangers. Destiny fired out “come dressed as an Israelite,” I looked at her in disbelief, I didn’t see the humor in it.

Karen and Dareen convinced me that we should all go together in Karen’s rusty, unregistered comby van, which ran on sheer miracle. I guess I was already a little in love with Elizabeth, it was hard not to be. Her politics turned out to be more Irish Catholic than Australian in a city where genuine understanding was next to impossible to find. Besides, her taste in music was just the introduction to the indie queer rock I’d been missing from my life. I agreed to go to the party but I didn’t dress up as anything. My hair was tied back in a little pony tail, and I announced that I was going as Steven Segal, but I got to be more creative with it as the night went on.

“Who are you supposed to be?” Elizabeth’s unconsciously homophobic mother asked. Someone had told her that there was a Palestinian in the house and she came to make sure I would know that she was a sympathetic Greens voter.

“Well, since horror is relative, I’m supposed to be straight.” She didn’t think that was funny. She blinked a couple of times, looked away and walked off.

Elizabeth’s younger sister, Louise, zoomed in on their father’s face with her camera and we were amusing ourselves with the specks of white fungus under his nose, that she had blown up to a substantial size in the view finder when he caught us laughing at him. A little later in the night he would exact his revenge on me, since he was in no position to admonish Louise, the apple of her mother’s ball-busting eye. “I don’t know whether I should hug and kiss you or shake your hand,” he said to me virtually out of nowhere, pointing at my arms in a sleeveless shirt. I gathered that he meant he wasn’t sure whether he should greet me as he would do a woman or a man. I said we could do both but we would have to review the case once I’d clocked the number of truck driving hours needed for the issuance of a full license. He seemed surprised. I told him I had always wanted to drive a really, really big truck. “Into what? Centerpoint Tower?”