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Al-Ahram Weekly 3 - 9 February 2000 Issue No. 467 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 3 - 9 February 2000 Issue No. 467
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Umm Kulthoum was an excessive person. Everything she did was better than anyone else and on top of this she was prolific. She did more and it was always the best. This is the ultimate recipe.
Rehearsing with Mohamed Abdel-Wahab
OK Madame
She floated about in realms of her own making and of other people's and was persona quite grata in all of them. This is a unique facet, given she was political, daring, totally single-minded and vocal about everything. The wonder is she was so loved. And loved she was by probably the largest listening audience in history. She crossed forbidden boundaries and no one ever said no.
OK seems the perfect term for her -- laconic, slightly good-bye but stick around things are humming. In the few conversations I had with her practicality and avoidance of the slightest whiff of stardom or grandiosity was total. She was a sophisticated woman of the world, an authentic grande dame made by nature itself. Her dignity was honoured even by heads of state. Everyone knew she could be steely, insolently dismissive of the snide or second rate, and it mattered not a damn to her. Everything was custom made by the gods for her, so she travelled light.
She had a remarkable mind, a musical soul and a sense of humour tending to the black. She knew her work by arrows and always struck the bulls eye.
How did she do it? A single woman in a savagely paternalist society. As Vivien Leigh said she was "the wonder of the ages". The phrase does nicely, except that it does no justice to the almost distressing power of her voice and musicality, things that kicked ruthlessly at the accepted and bourgeois. She was a revolutionary who glowed in diamonds, a democrat whose word was law.
Time removes even the memory of Cairo's millions at her death. All she sang about actually came from them. She and they belonged together and the pattern was Egypt itself. The love, in the end, was as incomprehensible as the voice itself. And absolutely OK for this particular Sitt.
David Blake
