The storyteller said
Once upon a time folk tales suppressed the female voice. Now, as Amany Abdel-Moneim discovers, a group of scholars is rewriting traditional Arabic tales to portray stronger images of women
The Women and Memory Forum (WMF), a group of scholars who promote women's rights, has embarked on an extensive project to rewrite Egyptian and other Arab folk tales from a gender-sensitive perspective.
Hoda El-Sadda, professor of English literature at Cairo University and coordinator of the WMF, told Al-Ahram Weekly that the forum sought to take an active approach towards revisiting the Arabic folk tale tradition. "We wanted to appeal to a wider audience because the stories are about our lives," El-Sadda said.
To date, the forum has published three children's books and two larger works, Qalat Al-Rawiya (The Storyteller Said), which contains both original and new folk stories, and Hekayat Hourriyeh (Hourriyeh's Tales).
In addition to publishing stories, the WMF holds performances of the tales and writing workshops that address ways of reformulating Arabic tales to include female perspectives. In these ways, the forum is working to challenge traditional images of women as well as promote interest in folk literature.
The task of performing WMF's folk tales was taken up by Caroleen Khalil, a young actress and director who has received three awards for best supporting actress from the Alexandria Film Festival and the National Film Festival. When selecting texts to enact, Khalil says she makes an effort to choose stories to which both male and female audiences can relate. The performances aim to present personal views and feelings in fictional terms in order to create a point of intersection between feminism and theatre.
Khalil has worked with the WMF for almost three years and has directed numerous shows for the group at the Mubarak Public Library, the Opera House, the Townhouse Gallery during the Sheherazade Now Festival. Last March, the WMF also performed in Bahrain.
As Khalil says, many of the actors who work with WMF have written the stories themselves and help in leading the writing workshops. "What I do is train them in the art of storytelling and public performance. I encourage the storytellers to act out the stories rather than merely read them," Khalil says. Her performances are accompanied by live music composed by Iman Salah, also a member of WMF.
The forum rewrites traditional stories using a mixture of colloquial Egyptian dialect and classical Arabic. Some of the revised versions, as El-Sadda says, vary little from the original text while others differ greatly in both structure and details. Some of the shorter stories are new concoctions which are inspired by rather than based on the original tales. One example is WMF member Rania Abdel-Rahman's story Tears, a new rendition of the popular Egyptian tale Sett El- Hosn wal-Saba' Gid'an. Unlike the original tale, Tears is narrated from a woman's perspective. Much of WMF's work targets young audiences, El-Sadda told the Weekly. "We intend to use the tales to deconstruct some of the misconceptions regarding the relationship between women and men, particularly stereotypes about male and female roles," she said.
Literary representations are powerful tools in shaping children's identities. Stories about Cinderella, Sett El-Hosn or Al-Shater Hassan, for example, serve not only as entertainment but also play a role in shaping the reader's character. "We tried to come up with stories that encourage young girls to learn to take initiatives [in life] by making the heroine's intelligence, rather than her beauty, the tool on which she depends for success," El-Sadda said.
Affirming the importance of nurturing children's creative imaginations, WMF initiated a training programme to sensitise school teachers to gender issues last year. "We gave teachers our new versions of children's stories to use while discussing gender issues at school, " said El-Sadda. "We also encourage teachers to hold storytelling sessions with children to expand their imaginations and create opportunities for them to invent their own endings to stories."
"We were invited by a women's NGO that provides services for school children in the Boulaq district to tell children our stories and organise activities for their summer camp. Children love the idea of enacting the folk tales and enjoy changing the characters in the stories," said El-Sadda. "This was our first appeal to children and it gradually developed into organising a storytelling performance for them at the Mubarak Public Library during the summer."
The rewriting of fairy tales is a deliberate move to take fables representing traditional views and inject them with more contemporary or modern feminist viewpoints, says Dr Ferial Ghazoul, professor of English and comparative literature at the American University in Cairo.
The WMF project was influenced by similar attempts to retell classic tales in other parts of the world. El-Sadda says that she was inspired by a group of Indian scholars who have rewritten old Indian folk tales. The group has also been influenced by similar movements in Canada.
Ghazoul highlighted the fact that WMF's project is part of a strong literary tradition of approaching classic themes from new perspectives. "Homer's Odyssey, for example," says Ghazoul, "was recreated in James Joyce's Ulysses." In addition, she points to Greek plays that were approached from new angles by French dramatists such as Racine and Corneille. Ghazoul underlines the fluid nature of literary texts, noting one African storytelling trend called the "Dilemma Tale" in which a group of five or six people listen to a narrated story and suggest their own endings.
However, not everyone is in favour of rewriting traditional stories. Ali Fahmi, a noted sociologist, has expressed reservations about WMF's project because he believes an accurate and scientific record of oral folklore should be documented before any attempt to change them is made "We don't have a national archive for oral folklore therefore, socio-cultural research should be conducted to determine the extent to which these stories are popular. Only then should the old-fashioned image be substituted with a new, positive one," Fahmi said.
Ghazoul disagrees, however. "We do have a record of our folk tales as they are already written down. If you modify or even re-write them, the so-called original is still there," Ghazoul says. "Literature is like capital -- you should use it and not just look at or repeat it," she stressed.
Al-Ahram Weekly Online : 5 -11 June 2003 (Issue No. 641)
Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/641/li1.htm