8 - 14 February 2001
Issue No.520
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 8 - 14 February 2001 Issue No.520 |
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Eyes wide open
The Open Door, Latifa El-Zayyat, trans. Marilyn Booth, Cairo: AUC Press, 2000. pp364
Another book by Latifa El-Zayyat begins: "I am strong insofar as I can begin again, begin anew, insofar as I can surmount losses, whether emotional or losses by death. I am strong in this sense." That book (Investigation Campaign: Personal Papers) is as close as Latifa El-Zayyat ever got to writing an autobiography. The Open Door is, in a sense, its (partial) fictional counterpart. Both are woven of much the same themes; both are deeply marked by the years immediately preceding and following the 1952 Revolution. The Open Door, however, is not a prettified fictional rendering of El-Zayyat's life as a young woman, her version of things as she would have liked them to have happened; if anything, it seems to have been an attempt to reclaim public space for her inner self -- a reassertion of her difficult conviction that life was to be lived according to a "guiding principle," and the expression of her desire to ascribe political motives to even the most personal of emotions.
LIBERATION MARCH: "With the English and French occupation of Port Said the resistance had become very active. Every day it broadened, as more and more women and men joined. Under organized leadership the units scattered, concealing themselves in homes and clinics, in shops, in every corner of Port Said..."
Today, the idea of a conflict between private and public suggests structural adjustment, or, in another frame of mind, privacy-invading paparazzi. The sense in which Latifa El-Zayyat understood it comes as a shock, imposing a realisation of how much time has passed in only a few short years. She expressed it thus in an interview, some time before her death, referring to her second marriage: "I... relaxed, for a time, in my private life. I indulged in my private affairs. What is general became less effective in my life. Not emotionally, but actually. I stopped working for what I believed to be right." And elsewhere, she wrote of that particular relationship: "Sex was the reason for the fall of the Roman Empire." Later, she retreated a step or two: "My answer," she explained, enigmatic as ever, "was only partially true."
This kind of conflict, between political conviction and inevitable, hypnotic, irresistible (if politically incorrect) attraction, seems to have marked El-Zayyat's life in different ways. She was an outspoken activist, and not one to shy away from dramatic statements: she was the young woman who marched up to the podium at a meeting of the National Committee of Students and Workers in 1946, lifted a portrait of King Farouk over her head, and sent it crashing to the floor. Until the end of her life, she fought on, protesting the Gulf War and lobbying against "normalisation" of relations with Israel as head of the Committee for the Defence of National Culture. Yet for her, as for so many other women, it was often necessary to shelve liberation of oneself and one's gender in favour of goals deemed more urgent: first liberation from colonial occupation, then liberation from monarchical oppression -- and now, perhaps, liberation from poverty. El-Zayyat herself admitted, not without bitterness, that this imposed schizophrenia had affected her personally: "Others respected me," she said, "and I had to pay for this respect. In the sense of controlling my personal, emotional needs. I had to pay..."
Elements of a single struggle were therefore dissociated -- indeed, posited as mutually exclusive: personal fulfilment vs political commitment, the nation's good vs the improvement of women's status. It is this conflict, and the agony it engendered in those who found themselves torn between its opposite poles, that The Open Door addresses.
Layla -- the female protagonist of this not-really-a-novel -- is a schoolgirl when it opens, in the 1940s. Her first inkling of what it means to be a woman in this society, at that time, comes with the onset of menstruation, and her father's traumatised realisation that Layla has grown up. She contrasts his hysterical distress with the pride he shows when her brother, Mahmud, begins to sprout a beard: "He had stared at his son, and the look in his eyes had made Layla wonder whether he still had his feet on the ground! He seemed to be soaring somewhere above, Mahmud in tow. His face had reddened; he had laughed and laughed, for no reason at all." When Layla, in turn, reaches puberty, she discovers that she is now subject to an elaborate set of rules, which affect almost every aspect of her life: what she may or may not say, where she is allowed to go and with whom, posture, dress and polite behaviour. She seeks to rebel against this stifling code of conduct, but seems unable to break free beyond occasional moments of respite: still at school, she marches in demonstrations triggered by the abrogation of the 1936 Treaty, and discovers within herself "a voice that summoned her whole being, that united the old Layla with her future self and with the collective being of these thousands of people -- faces, faces as far as she could see."
The theme of personal liberation through participation in a collective effort recurs throughout the book. Devastated by the discovery that her cousin, Isam, who professes to love her, is having an affair with the maid, Layla is driven to the verge of suicide; having numbed herself to all emotion as a consequence of this betrayal -- proof of his fundamental, hypocritical immorality -- she ends the "relationship." This, however, is not to be her last shattering experience of the wiles of men; a few years later, as a university student, she is drawn inexorably into the orbit of Dr Ramzi, her philosophy professor, a man whose cold moral rectitude seems to offer her the possibility of salvation. He too reveals himself (during their engagement party) as a hypocrite of the highest order, interested in Layla only because, as he tells her, "you are compliant and quiet, and you listen to me, and you do what I say." His reserve crumbles later in the evening when he is confronted by the seductive Gamila: "Layla could see Ramzi's eyes fixed avidly on the shadowy line between Gamila's breasts, his lips rounded in a smile that she found disgusting, reminding her of the grimace of a predatory animal."
It is with Husayn, ultimately, that Layla will find peace of mind -- Husayn, who urges her: "Let go, my love, run forward, connect yourself to others, to the millions of others, to that good land, our land, to the good people, ours... It is a love that makes one grow: love of the nation, love for its people. So let go, my love, run forward, fling the door open wide, and leave it open." Later, he informs her: "... my love for my nation has become totally intertwined with my love for you, so that you became a symbol for everything I love in the nation."
If these sentiments, today, inspire a cringe of embarrassment rather than a flush of inspiration, it is not necessarily because The Open Door is dated. It is, however, little without its context -- an eminently historical book, it may be most interesting when read as an artifact for a historiography of mentalités. This is why the erudite and informative introduction written by Marilyn Booth, whose mastery of Arabic and intimate knowledge of modern Arabic literature are common knowledge, appears as the most enlightening part of the book, which it inserts deftly within a context that suddenly reveals its relevance: "... 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... the social and political struggles that al-Zayyat and other independent-minded, courageous writers have made part of their fictional worlds are not entirely a thing of the past."
Perhaps the problem with reading the novel itself, then, is that irony has happened in the meantime; disillusionment can make the most passionate and noble of sentiments appear desperately tacky. Or perhaps the redundancies that resonate in Arabic are merely repetitious in English; no matter how skilful a translator Booth may happen to be (and is), she cannot make a fictionalised polemical tract into a heart-stoppingly good novel. The sense of temporal dislocation the book's bright-eyed resolve engenders is therefore compounded by an almost cultural alienation (how is it that none of the characters shows even a hint of humour?), reinforced in turn by the unusual decision to transliterate some colloquial Arabic expressions, and juxtapose them with others translated into American slang, resulting in such surprising phrases as "you're kidding, shaykha." In some cases, too, one would have wished for a footnote or two; in the discussion of materials for Gamila's wedding trousseau, for instance, readers uninitiated into the omnivorous characteristics of Egyptian 'ammiya would have found the references to "gibere" and "simone" less mystifying if they had been informed that these strange beasts were a textile (guipure) and a colour (salmon), respectively.
Prendre ses désirs pour des réalités -- that is the temptation the novel offers the novelist. El-Zayyat was scarred by the impossibility of reconciling her own desires and the reality of which she was a part. To resolve this dilemma, she may have believed it necessary to annihilate her own individuality, the better to take her place in the great march of history. The impossibility of that endeavour is demonstrated most clearly in how kitsch it appears to the reader of 2001. The grand and noble sentiments expressed in The Open Door seem to crush the characters they are alleged to move, reducing them to paper cutouts whose love of nation, self and each other is indivisible, glorious and one-dimensional.
Reviewed by Pascale Ghazaleh
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