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Al-Ahram Weekly 22 - 28 June 2000 Issue No. 487 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 22 - 28 June 2000 Issue No. 487
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Focus Opinion Culture Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters
Speaking in tongues
By Youssef RakhaNow a fully fledged American -- the term she uses to describe herself is Egyptian American -- Mona Mikhail will regrettably not be with us for very long. She does return, regularly and frequently, but the pace of her life is such that it becomes impossible to relax and mingle the way she used to prior to her departure for the United States. "That," she blushes, "was a very long time ago." It is a predicament -- unmarried, her family members mostly first-generation immigrants, her academic interests deeply rooted in Egyptian soil. "This is one thing I consider increasingly essential, the question of Egyptian-American exchange. In my family alone there are many second-generation youngsters and it is very frustrating for them. So we are arranging a programme to bring them here over the summer so they can start learning the language, meet Egyptian peers, relate to the environment..."
She enunciates like an orator. Surprisingly, the accent is more British than American, the demeanour more old-style than new-age. What could be her reasons for coming back? "After all, I am Egyptian." This implies family and friends, memories and obligations, but above all a sense of belonging played out consistently in her work. This time she is here on an American Research Centre grant to study theatre for eight months. "Not only the drama on which it is based," mind you, "but the actual dynamics of a performance and even the performance space itself." Having supplemented her long academic career in English and comparative literature with a sustained interest in Arab women -- writing, among other books, Images of Arab Women (1979), an exploration of received ideas about women in Egypt and the Arab world that perceptively draws on modern Arabic literature -- her contribution is in fact far more noteworthy than it might sound.
Our cultural editor Dr Mursi Saad El-Din's gracious introduction, as charming as it is inevitable, revealed Professor Mona to be a discreet activist and social commentator working from within. "Imagine," beamed Dr Mursi, "what this kind of research implies. She is a Christian woman writing from America about the status of Muslim women throughout the Arab world. She is a gleaming instance of our national unity at its intellectual best." Such passionate attention and bias rightly set my mind on course: this must be one of Dr Mursi's favoured former students, and somebody who preserves the mores and morals, the sensibility of that quaint group of (often Anglophile) academics who could perhaps be described as the earliest pioneers of Arab cosmopolitanism. Typically of this group, Mikhail's shifting of perspectives, her belonging to a different country and a different culture, have in no way diverted her away from the culture into which she was born. The 21st-century sequel to her book, Re-imaging Arab Women, is due to appear shortly, at any rate. And in it, she follows up her work with as much engagement.
(photo: Sherif Sonbol)
"It is one of my interests." Mikhail is so nonchalant you'd think she had little to do with the discipline in question. At this point we are already in the family house in Heliopolis, a minor achievement of colonial architecture whose garden has been taken over by a modern-style, hence architecturally un-aesthetic hotel. Where does the post-colonial professor stand vis-à-vis the transformations that beset the society into which she was born? "Well..." For one thing, she remembers, she used to go all the way to Cairo University by metro, both ways, every day of the week. "Today it is unthinkable for me to even contemplate public transport." Yet she is reluctant to talk about the now, perhaps because it remains, for her, the only possible continuation of the before, the memory of which she doesn't want to spoil. "We were the luckiest generation ever at Cairo University, we had opportunities nobody else ever had and, probably, nobody else ever will" is all she says in retaliation.
Rashad Rushdi and Fatma Moussa are among the many professors she remembers. Graduating from St Claire's School, the English-oriented secondary education establishment, Mikhail was comfortable with the language and the environment. These, as she joyfully recalls, were the great days of the non-aligned movement, Egypt's attempt to play an international role and the numerous dignitaries who, on their visits, required educated and bilingual guides. A synchronised swimming expert with medals, a university girl who danced "beneath the dome of Cairo University" and one such guide, Mikhail received a scholarship to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor that took her away for good -- in body, definitely, but not wholly in spirit. Since then she has received a PhD and taught at Princeton, before settling for a demanding position at New York University. But the saga that began with her pioneering studies on the fiction of Youssef Idris and Naguib Mahfouz has not ended, and is not remotely about to end.
