Four Women from Egypt
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A number of years back, Mrs. Sadat published her book A Woman of Egypt. I still remember the contradictions in feeling, which overcame me when a colleague and friend brought it to me. I recall that even as I browsed through it, the notion of “representation” though ill-defined at the time, emerged as a thought that would recur often in days to follow. At the time, I lived in the United Kingdom, and suffered together with the usual bouts of home sickness, a serious degree of frustration from having to live in a cultural and societal context, in which the elements that constituted my “reality” (that is everything that I thought defined me as an Arab woman) surrounded me only in memory. When I saw the book I was happy, angry and frustrated all at once. I was happy because such a book would afford me documentation that would back my remembrances amongst those with whom I lived. The anger was, I think because I would not have chosen as gratuitously the wife of President Sadat to represent me in that particular moment at the end of the seventies, as most people would have assumed. The frustration was that the book, like others about my homeland in foreign languages, came with all the baggage that third world translated literature arrives with in the Northern hemisphere: a sense that it is an exception and that the background from which it emerged is of a majority that lives in a world implicitly understood not to deserve the same attention.
 
What remained with me, however, was that the traditional “representative” of my culture, my history, my view of the world, all which I held in common with others with whom I did not now live, was never someone or some text or incident, with which I as an individual could identify and relate. The reasons are lengthy but we would not be distorting the truth were we to reduce them to a single statement: the relation of the media to politics and history. That day I remember I returned the book to my English friend saying: it would have been good if it were about five or six women from Egypt. Naturally, Mary did not understand and I did not explain. I gave her Anthony Nutting’s Nasserto read, instead.
 
When I saw Tahani Rachid’s film, my emotional reaction was like someone had given me a gift I had longed for. Between first ladies and the poor simple oppressed women there are others who are rarely given a chance to influence through the media, others with whom I could have identified and who would have provided me with a sense of belonging while I was growing up, who would have spared me the feeling that my questions were being asked in a vacuum of no previous achievement. When I had voiced my opinion of Jehan Sadat’s book, what I was really saying was: I wish there had been more biographies of women from Egypt.
 
Had those biographies -then hoped forbeen executed with the sensitivity and insight with which Tahani Rachid executed her work on Amina Rachid, Safinaz Kazim, Wedad Mitry and Shahinda Mekled, we would have seen life in the homeland documented over many half centuries. We would have been better familiarized with the topography of our cities, and would have better known the points of rupture and change which informed the collective memory as they found their way into the individual’s recollections of things past. We would have learned to perceive of diversity and multiplicity as enriching and empowering instead of delimitating elements to unity and solidarity. We would have in short come to realize the tissues that cohere and join and which create and embody the integrity of our history as a nation.
 
This is what Tahani Rachid does by documenting the lives of the four friends she chose for her film for, though each is “remembering” separately, what emerges in the final analysis is a perspective that underscores the common in those experiences, despite the differences in background, affiliations and ideologies that each woman claims as a stance apart from the others. The ‘narrative’ when all is said, is not of Amina Rachid, or Safinaz Kazim, or Wedad Mitry or Shahinda Mekled. The narrative is of Egypt, with all its paradoxes, and in all its diversity and its conflicts as well and so in all its dynamism, and continuity as a geopoliticohistorical entity that is being constantly recreated via the efforts of its inhabitants, women and men.
It is changeable, as the point of view which ‘narrates’ it is, but it is also tangible as the symbols that accompany it in the collective memory, which the film documents in images of Princess Fawzia receiving the Turkish salutation “tammanu” from a lady in waiting at the steps of Abdeen, Sidky Pasha addressing the nation, Gamal Abdel Nasser in celebration cortege, demonstrations in Kamshish, and a small and pretty Coptic church piously tucked away from the crowded streets. The over sound here does not comment on the picture in a direct way, rather the two enter a dialogical relation from which is generated an experience of “re-cognizing” as if it is not Safinaz or Wedad or Shahinda or Amina who are remembering but the spectator. What further enriches this experience is that the eye of the camera does not gloss over the body language involved in the interaction between those four very different women, who are in fact the very stuff from which conflict is made: the Muslim fundamentalist, the Christian socialist, the Nasserist, and the progressive aristocrat.
 
Last but not least, it seems to me that such a film could not have been achieved except by a woman who went through a similar experience of foreignness, not to say exile, as I described in the beginning of this article. What she needed, I suspect, was a document that would represent Egypt as she sees it. In the absence of such a document she went out to create her own.
 
Somaya Ramadan

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