Nora's cats

Nehad Selaiha reads a poignant message in Nora Amin's Qitt Yuhtadar (A Cat Dying) at Rawabet

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"Nora's creations are always intimately personal, deeply rooted in her own experiences", I caught myself saying to my neighbour in the first row at Rawabet as we waited for Nora Amin's latest work, Qitt Yuhtadar (A Cat Dying), to begin. I was about to add that such is the artistic integrity of those creations that no one, unless they knew Nora personally, would guess it, but was distracted. The rain was pattering hard on the tin roof, making a big din, and trickled through two holes, forming two dangerously growing pools on our right, in the space separating our raised seats from the black, rubber sheets covering the cement floor of the performance area. It was freezing cold inside this converted garage and, as I pulled the collar of my coat up and tightly round my ears and sank warmly into its folds, I felt vaguely uneasy.

Qitt Yuhtadar (A Cat Dying)

That the roof had not been properly sealed, that a wooden floor had not been installed, that the place had not been made soundproof seemed partly my fault -- our shared fault as audience and as citizens. As the minutes ticked away, my vague unease developed into positive feelings of shame and guilt. How could we expect people, let alone artists, to function, not to mention giving their best, in such dismal conditions? How could I sit there breezily discussing the personal and impersonal in art when Nora and her young cast were about to tread those thin, miserable sheets and battle with the icy air, the drumming of the rain on the roof and the stray noises from outside? Rawabet has been around for more than two years and has improved considerably since; but a lot more needs to be done and the money for it is not easily available. Why have not we, the loud supporters of the independent fringe, who have frequented this place so often and got so much pleasure out of it, done something more concrete to support it and stop its gaps other than oral and written applause and encouragement? Why haven't we started a collection of some sort, or made a concerted effort to pressurize the Cultural Development Fund, or Tareq Abul-Fotouh's independent, Brussels-based Young Arab Theatre Fund, to fork out some money to meet its structural needs?

And as if Nora had been reading my thoughts, her Qitt Yuhtadar unfolded as a painful parable and condemning protest. Perhaps it is too late now to do anything for those 'proud street cats', as the show metaphorically identifies the struggling, independent groups. Homeless, bereft of any communal support, and often regarded as subversive, unsociable pests by the authorities, those 'street cats' have come to despise the values and criteria of a fetid society, bred on tameness and obedience, and though they realise, are almost certain, that 'society' will eventually suppress and virtually kill them, they will not give in without a brave fight, and would rather die than surrender.

As I watched Qitt Yuhtadar, my mind involuntarily strayed to T. S. Eliot's set of whimsical, feline poems entitled Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. In the opening poem, "The Naming of Cats", Old Possum adopts, as Molly Best Tinsley (of the University of Maryland) remarks, "a deferential manner towards these secretive, superior creatures who know their own 'deep and inscrutable singular' names and identities as we humans can hardly manage to do.'" "Implicit in Old Possum's deference," she goes on to say, "is a warning against condescending to these felines or taking their activities lightly." They should be approached with delicacy, respect and awe, "but once we fully accept and thus enter their world, when we get down to tabulating their exploits, we find that this world can accommodate a range of responses, from wry appreciation to fear and outrage."

Rather than the 15 poems and 12 cat portraits Eliot offers -- made world famous by Andrew Lloyd Weber's musical Cats -- Nora treats us to five poetical monologues, interspersed with eloquent dance and movement sequences which, while providing an oblique, sardonic commentary on Egyptian society and its mores and morals, focus the problem of free expression and free conduct and the condition of alienation that ineluctably accrues from championing either or both. Underlying all five monologues is the image of the independent, human performer as a street cat, and the irony and dramatic conflict, which links the separate sequences and gives coherence and meaning to the show as a whole, springs from the rebellious human characteristics reflected in the behaviour of cats and the actual, conventional responses of society and its conservative establishments to it.

The difference in impact between Eliot's poems and Nora's monologues is basically a cultural one: while Eliot's society shows a remarkable degree of tolerance towards what it regards as the anarchic, destructive behaviour of "Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer," who "represent an elusive underworld defiantly antagonistic to human society," in Tinsley's words, doing no more in reaction than crying out that "there's nothing at all to be done about that," Egyptian society, viewed from Nora's perspective, is intent on eliminating difference or any sign of rebellion.

In the first monologue in Nora's piece, voice 1, delivered by the authoress/director/choreographer herself, draws attention to the phenomenon of cat corpses lying on the streets and the effect this has on the tender imagination of a little child. The child, performed by Nora, gets at an early age to identify with all those dead cats she sees on the streets and to wonder why their death goes so crassly unnoticed. The question accompanies her throughout her life and triggers others, equally existentially baffling. The second monologue, delivered in English by the German Eva Balzer, clarifies the metaphor more by setting up the street cat as a model for the independent artist who would sacrifice her life rather than her integrity, and whose bedevilling quest is how to integrate herself and find the centre of energy which would unify her into a fully integrated human being and artist.

The third voice, Ihab Mustafa's, speaks of Tom, an exceptional house cat who has trained his owner to respect his wayward ways and uncommon behaviour. Then the fourth voice, Adel Antar's, arrives, full of sound and fury, signifying the need to eliminate every creature who goes against the norms of society, thus justifying the need to liquidate all stray dogs and cats. Then Mohamed Foad speaks, as the fifth voice, talking on behalf of all street cats and independent artists, and robustly declares: "We shall never be part of the game you call life and play along; we shall never allow you to use us. And would you please get us off your minds, and out of your corpses-strewn lives?" When society, intent on diagnosing the 'illnesses' of 'cats' and finding a cure for them speaks in the next scene, the planned rescue operation ends with a telling question: "Do you really want to save those cats?"

The final, silent, sequence, performed to the tunes of Ramzi Sabri's highly emotive music, shows Nora heroically struggling to remain upright, but flopping down, time and again, on those black rubber sheets and the hard cement floor. The sight was enough to break your heart. As she stretched up, doubled down, shrank and fell, I guiltily remembered Eliot's lines:

You have learned enough to see

That Cats are much like you and me...

And other people whom we find

Possessed of various types of mind.

I had often prided myself on sharing the same cast of mind as Nora and her independent compatriots. But on that rainy night, the 9th of January, I was cruelly undeceived. There were Nora and her colleagues, striving to build a theatrical metaphor and exuberantly exploring their role as forces of social disruption, uncontrollable, perhaps, even incorrigible, and there I was, with my friends and colleagues, all sympathetic supporters of Nora and her like, sinking cozily in our warm wrappings and wondering what the show had been like in Alexandria where it first performed at the more amenable conditions of the Lycee theatre French Cultural Centre.

Like Eliot's Macavity, whose defiance of the law finally establishes his 'non-presence' as the law, Nora' cats were a positive presence, a rousing call warning against all manifestations of moral vacancy and inefficiency on the domestic scene, and an embittered protest against our flabbiness, as intellectuals, in standing up to the all too destructive policies of the bureaucracies which govern our lives.