[Engaging Books is a returning series that features books by various publishers on a given theme, along with an excerpt from each volume. This installment involves a selection from the University of Texas on the theme of Egyptian Cultural Studies. Other publishers' books will follow on a monthly basis.]
Table of Contents
Egypt’s Beer: Stella, Identity, and the Modern State
By Omar D. Foda
About the Book
About the Author
In the Media / Scholarly Praise
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews
Acting Egyptian: Theater, Identity, and Political Culture in Cairo, 1869–1930
By Carmen Gitre
About the Book
About the Author
Scholarly Praise
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews
Love, Sex, and Desire in Modern Egypt: Navigating the Margins of Respectability
By L.L. Wynn
About the Book
About the Author
In the Media / Scholarly Praise
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews
Egypt’s Beer: Stella, Identity, and the Modern State
By Omar D. Foda
About the Book
Although alcohol is generally forbidden in Muslim countries, beer has been an important part of Egyptian identity for much of the last century. Egypt’s Stella beer (which only coincidentally shares a name with the Belgian beer Stella Artois) became a particularly meaningful symbol of the changes that occurred in Egypt after British occupation. Weaving cultural studies with business history, Egypt’s Beer traces Egyptian history from 1880 to 2003 through the study of social, economic, and technological changes that surrounded the production and consumption of Stella beer in Egypt, providing an unparalleled case study of economic success during an era of seismic transformation. Delving into archival troves—including the papers of his grandfather, who for twenty years was CEO of the company that produced Stella—Omar D. Foda explains how Stella Beer achieved a powerful presence in all popular forms of art and media, including Arabic novels, songs, films, and journalism. As the company’s success was built on a mix of innovation, efficient use of local resources, executive excellence, and shifting cultural dynamics, this is the story of the rise of a distinctly Egyptian “modernity” seen through the lens of a distinctly Egyptian brand.
About the Author
Omar D. Foda is a visiting assistant professor of history at Towson University. He holds a PhD in Near Eastern languages and civilizations from the University of Pennsylvania, and his work has appeared in several journals and volumes, including The Birth of the Arab Citizen and the Changing of the Middle East.
In the Media / Scholarly Praise for Egypt’s Beer
“Pioneering and seminal, this remarkable scholarly accomplishment is the first work that deals with the beer industry in modern Egypt. It is a major contribution to the study of the history of consumerism and the development of modern economies in Egypt and the Middle East.”
Israel Gershoni, Tel Aviv University, coauthor of Confronting Fascism in Egypt: Dictatorship versus Democracy in the 1930s
“Egypt’s Beer is a uniquely well-documented narrative based on an array of archives ranging from the Egyptian state to Heineken to the private papers of the author's grandfather, who was for decades the central figure in beer production in Egypt. It is a significant contribution to the socioeconomic history of Egypt and to our understanding of the country's material, cultural, and business history.”
Relli Shechter, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, author of The Rise of the Egyptian Middle Class: Socio-Economic Mobility and Public Discontent from Nasser to Sadat
Read a review in Egyptian Streets
Additional Information
December 2019
296 Pages
$34.95 (list price)
Cloth ISBN: 9781477319543
Paper ISBN: 9781477319550
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
From Chapter 6, Getting the Dutch Out: How Stella Became the Beer of the Egyptian Regime, 1961–1972
But to return to my office roles these are, as mentioned, minimal. The only regular contact I have takes place during weekly management meetings. Beyond that, [Ismail Omar] Foda never consults me, and I do not give unsolicited advice except during said meetings in the general discussions. Neither does [Alber] Farag come to me to ask for my opinion. —Erick Kettner to Wittert van Hoogland, January 8, 1962
As the above passage indicates, the actual experience of nationalization proved to be a deeply personal one for the executives and workers of the companies involved. From 1956 onward, the fear of nationalization was a persistent reality for the Crown and Pyramid Breweries. This fear drove the companies to be ever mindful of the government’s demands, even as they worked to pursue the paths that would be most profitable. This balancing act shaped not only the interactions between the companies and the government, but also the relationships between the companies’ executives and management and between their management and workforce. In 1960 the government pursued a new round of nationalizations that shattered any hope that the beer companies could remain independent.
To be sure, the Dutch, Greek, and Egyptian people involved in the beer industry had been expecting the takeover for some time; nevertheless, they responded to the government’s measures not with resignation but rather by struggling to hold on to what they believed to be theirs. Some individuals fought against the regime, while others collaborated. However, as shown by the case of the Egyptian who came to head both companies, Dr. Ismail Omar Foda (commonly referred to as Dr. Omar Foda and the author’s grandfather), the only thing that mattered to the government was how useful any given person or entity could be to them. The business of commandeering a private-sector enterprise was a messy one, and very few in the beer industry were left unscathed.
The nationalization or Egyptianization of the beer industry went beyond ensuring that everyone who worked in the companies had Egyptian citizenship. It also entailed excising all elements of the industry that the government deemed “foreign,” including all foreign nationals, some indigenous Coptic Christians, and mutamaṣṣirūn, those “people of foreign origin who had become permanent residents” and whose language and habits had become “Egyptianized.” Nationalization also meant the removal of some Muslim Egyptians, who, in the eyes of the government, had used their financial position to exploit the country and stifle its growth. Although these people had the key feature of true Egyptians—adherence to Islam—they could never be “authentic” Egyptians in the eyes of the government because they had come from the elite classes. Beyond that, Egyptianizing meant closing the power and wealth gaps among the executives, the management, and the workforce. Most important, it meant placing the entire industry under the government’s control.
The beer itself, as previous chapters have shown, needed no Egyptianizing. Thanks to the work of influential Dutchmen and of the Egyptian entrepreneurs against whom the Nasser-led regime would rally, Stella beer had become the beverage of choice for young Egyptians looking for fun. Recall that by the 1950s, Egyptians had unprecedented access to Stella beer. As Stella had become the beer of Egypt, it had lost some of its “foreign” allure and veneer. Along the way, many Egyptians had come to regard beer as not merely an “evil” drink or a “fun” drink, but as something in between: part of an everyday culture of leisure.
Nationalizations
In 1960 the government shook the Egyptian business world with a new round of nationalizations, inspiring deep fear among the beer companies that they could be next. Nasser’s government struck the first blow against Egypt’s national banks, Bank Misr and the National Bank of Egypt, in February. The government followed by nationalizing major daily newspapers, such as al-Ahram, Akhbar al-Youm, and Ruz al-Yusuf. Next, it took over the bus companies. Although the specter of government involvement had hung over Erick Kettner’s head for nearly five years, as the managing director of Pyramid Brewery, he was still shocked by these events. When Kettner reported the events to Wittert van Hoogland, he could barely contain his disdain: “These [nationalizations] are justified by the claim that they are done to ensure the freedom of the press (seriously).” For Kettner, this reasoning was farcical, as he believed these nationalizations had both economic and political motives, including the suppression of free speech. He noted that it was a poorly kept secret that the nationalized newspapers were going to have no say in what was printed.
Kettner’s negative reaction to these nationalizations grew out of his distaste for Nasser and his government. Kettner had little faith in the populism of Nasser and saw it only as trouble for the Egyptian economy. Kettner’s feelings were only exacerbated by the fact that with each passing month, the star of Nasser shone only brighter for most Egyptians. Nasser’s populist policies—land reforms, support for workers and peasants rights, and the push for greater social equality, all infused by a strong anti-imperialism and jingoism—had won him massive support among the effendiyya (the liminal class composed of students, professionals, teachers, civil servants, and small businessmen), workers, and peasants. The nationalization of the newspapers, which turned a relatively free press into one aimed solely to “justify, support and flatter” the increasingly authoritarian Nasser regime, only confirmed to Kettner that his skepticism of the regime was justified.
The nationalization of three vital sectors in quick succession—banks, transport, and newspapers—set the entire private sector on alert. The businessmen of the private sector assumed that the cotton firms would be the next target and that their nationalization would be accompanied by a potential modification of the Agrarian Land Reform of 1952, reducing the number of feddans one could own from two hundred to fifty. After that, perhaps even a larger round of nationalizations would follow. Businessmen were worried that even if they managed to avoid nationalization, the government would still destroy their profits with the restrictive policies that accompanied these nationalizations.
The businessmen of the private sector proved prescient in their worries over the renewed activist streak of the government. In the summer of 1960, the government nationalized “import houses and wholesalers of pharmaceutical products simultaneously with the tea packers.” In the winter, the government nationalized all institutions that had significant investments of Belgian capital. This included the Tramways du Caire, the Rolin Group (to which Pyramid used to belong), and the Banque Belge. This last bit of government business was quite troubling to Pyramid because Banque Belge was their primary bank. Kettner had a trusted contact in the bank, Mr. Ashkar, who had aided the brewery in the numerous transfer issues it faced as a multinational functioning in Nasser’s Egypt. Kettner trusted this man to such an extent that, even after the bank had been nationalized, he wanted to maintain the relationship.
This round of nationalizations reverberated beyond Pyramid’s relations with the Banque Belge. The Egyptian stock market took a significant hit, as economic volatility deleteriously affected domestic and foreign sales of one of Egypt’s biggest products, cotton. Prices dropped, and in the first quarter of 1960, cotton sellers were able to sell only three-fifths of what they had sold the previous year. The dip in the stock market would not have been so bad if it had been met by new capital from foreign investors looking to profit by “buying low.” However, the Egyptian government severely limited foreign investment, claiming to fear “predatory” foreign capitalists. The government, in fact, promulgated a law that required President Nasser to approve all foreign investment in the country. The limiting of foreign capital coupled with the government’s nationalizations of companies supported by large amounts of foreign capital struck fear in the hearts of those working at the Heineken-backed Crown and Pyramid Breweries. They could not help but dread what the future held for them.
Call for Reviews
If you would like to review the book for the Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya, please email info@jadaliyya.com
Acting Egyptian: Theater, Identity, and Political Culture in Cairo, 1869–1930
By Carmen Gitre
About the Book
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, during the “protectorate” period of British occupation in Egypt—theaters and other performance sites were vital for imagining, mirroring, debating, and shaping competing conceptions of modern Egyptian identity. Central figures in this diverse spectrum were the effendis, an emerging class of urban, male, anticolonial professionals whose role would ultimately become dominant. Acting Egyptian argues that performance themes, spaces, actors, and audiences allowed pluralism to take center stage while simultaneously consolidating effendi voices.
From the world premiere of Verdi’s Aida at Cairo’s Khedivial Opera House in 1871 to the theatrical rhetoric surrounding the revolution of 1919, which gave women an opportunity to link their visibility to the well-being of the nation, Acting Egyptian examines the ways in which elites and effendis, men and women, used newly built performance spaces to debate morality, politics, and the implications of modernity. Drawing on scripts, playbills, ads, and numerous other sources, the book brings to life provocative debates that fostered a new image of national culture and performances that echoed the events of urban life in the struggle for independence.
About the Author
Carmen Gitre is an assistant professor of history at Virginia Tech University. She holds a PhD in history from Rutgers University and previously taught in the international studies and history departments at Seattle University.
Scholarly Praise for Acting Egyptian
“This cleverly framed book uses theater and music performance as a lens for viewing the emergence and contestation of effendi nationalism in early twentieth-century Egypt. Gitre draws on little-known scripts, Egyptian and British archival sources, and articles in the vociferous Egyptian press. Her close readings and historical research show how jesters, comedians, and women both reinforced and challenged the efendiyya's antiroyalist and anticolonial moralizing discourse at every turn. This accessibly written book will interest students and scholars of Arabic theatre, the "Arab Renaissance," anticolonial nationalism, and vernacular theatre traditions.”
Margaret Litvin, Boston University, author of Hamlet's Arab Journey: Shakespeare's Prince and Nasser's Ghost
“Acting Egyptian explores the world of theater during a formative period of Egyptian history. Gitre draws insights from architectural, social, labor, and women's history in order to examine Egyptian identity on and off the stage. In the process, she recounts for her readers vivid vignettes of the playwrights, actors, audiences, and performers of the era. This work will be of interest to historians of Egypt and the Middle East as well as historians of the arts who wish to explore Arabic theater traditions.”
Hoda Yousef, Denison University, author of Composing Egypt: Reading, Writing, and the Emergence of a Modern Nation, 1870-1930
Additional Information
December 2019
192 Pages
$50.00 (list price)
Cloth ISBN: 9781477319185
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Chapter One: Aida in Egypt
Cairo’s Khedivial Opera House was filled to capacity long before curtain time on the evening of December 24, 1871. The bedecked, eager audience had assembled to witness the world premiere of Giuseppe Verdi’s highly anticipated opus, Aida. Over the next few hours, spectators witnessed a tragic love story between Aida, an Ethiopian slave, and Radames, an Egyptian military commander, set sometime during the “reign of the Pharaohs,” a vague, 3,000-year period. Boundaries between fact and fiction, reality and spectacle, blurred as the production unfolded. The actress and society writer Mabel Caillard described European actors mingling with “genuine Ethiopians and real slaves…[who carried] statues and figures of the ancient gods” from Cairo’s Museum of Antiquities. By the end of the opera, some claimed that spectators had witnessed 3,000 actors—and nonactors—cross the stage.
By all accounts, the production was a smashing success. One spectator raved that it was a production of “superlative magnificence…this premier performance of Aida was simply perfect.” Critics from a host of foreign journals sang Verdi’s praises. The Italian journalist Filippo Filippi reported “prolonged applause, warm ovations, unanimous cries of enthusiasm” so disruptive that an impatient audience member cried out, “It’s not finished!” In total, he reported a surprising—perhaps hyperbolic—thirty-two curtain calls at the end of the show. Immediately after the performance, Superintendent of Khedivial eaters Paul Draneht sent a telegram to Verdi commending him for the “triumphant success” of the opera. “Not one number passed over in silence,” Draneht wrote; “total fanaticism. Enthusiastic audience applauded absent Maestro. Congratulations, thanks.”
The Ottoman governor of Egypt, Khedive Ismaʾil (r. 1863–1879), had invited Verdi to compose an original opera worthy of Cairo’s new opera house. Under Ismaʾil’s patronage the opera house was constructed in 1869, on the eve of completion of the Suez Canal. Ismaʾil asked the French Egyptologist and director of the Museum of Antiquities, Auguste Mariette, to propose a storyline to Verdi—a story that would be, in Ismaʾil’s words, “purely ancient and Egyptian.” Blending scientific Egyptology and popular Egyptomania, Mariette drew the plot of his story from the reign of the pharaoh Ramses III, even patterning costumes after scenes from his tomb and insisting that all actors be clean-shaven, as the ancients appeared not to sport facial hair. The storyline captured Verdi’s imagination, and, together with the librettist Antonio Ghizlanzoni, he composed the opera that would become a global success and a staple of operatic repertoires in both Egypt and abroad.
Most scholars and fans see Aida as a European opera about Egypt. What complicates this is the fact that Egypt’s khedive—a hereditary title granted by the Ottoman sultan to the leader of Egypt—initiated the project and fully funded its creation. Ismaʾil’s request that the opera be “purely ancient and Egyptian” raises a host of questions, not least because opera did not resemble any indigenous forms of musical performance. As the historian Donald Reid asks: “What does authenticity mean in a European musical extravaganza that no ancient Egyptian and few Egyptians of his own day could have understood?” Ismaʾil’s choice to make a “purely ancient” Egypt the subject of the opera is also intriguing in light of his efforts to modernize the state and its inhabitants. Why did Ismaʾil select ancient Egyptians as the subject of the opera as opposed to modern Egyptians? Was this, as scholar Edward Said asks, simply one more Orientalist opera, or was it something more?
Aida’s premier was part of a larger program of urban renewal that had peaked with the Suez Canal’s inauguration on November 17, 1869. Ismaʾil considered celebrations surrounding the inauguration as an opportunity to showcase a new Cairo to his visitors and to match the impressive European exhibitions of the nineteenth century. To this end, he instituted a massive public works program to modernize the sections of Cairo and Alexandria that visitors would most likely see—or be directed to see. Wide boulevards, landscaped gardens, and luxury hotels built of the iron, steel, and improved glass of the nineteenth century spread across what had once been a swampy floodplain. The jewel in the crown was the construction of a new Khedivial Opera House.
The grand, four-act opera Aida opens in the royal palace in Memphis. Radames, a captain of the Egyptian Guards, learns that the Ethiopian army is planning to attack Egypt. The audience quickly recognizes that this poses a personal conflict for him, for he is in love with Aida, an Ethiopian slave in the king’s court. By the second act, Radames has defeated the Ethiopians. Before he returns home, however, the king’s daughter, the jealous Amneris, who is also in love with Radames, tricks Aida into believing Radames died in conflict. Aida’s distress reveals that she, too, is in love with Radames, and Amneris threatens her in anger.
Aida’s fortunes worsen when the victorious Radames returns to Thebes with her father, Amonasro, as a captive. In the third act, as Aida sings longingly for her homeland, her father appears and asks her to gather information about the Egyptian army from Radames. He quickly hides when Radames appears, and soon Radames promises to marry Aida, willingly revealing the Egyptian army’s plans at her request. Having caught Radames revealing the army’s secrets, Amneris appears, and she accuses him of treason. In the final act, Radames is condemned to be buried alive, and he refuses Amneris’s promise to save him if he would leave Aida. Before the vault is sealed, Ra- dames discovers that Aida has placed herself in the crypt to die with him.
When Ismaʾil first broached the idea of an opera with Verdi, Egypt was part of the Ottoman Empire. The opera, however, showcased an ancient and civilized Egypt, one with an empire of its own. Its presentation not only served to entertain but also was very much tied to power and control over the depiction of history and imperial identity. A European opera about ancient Egypt, Aida was nevertheless Ismaʾil’s view of modern Egypt. At the same time that Egyptians were Ottoman subjects, Ismaʾil was fulfilling some of his own imperial ambitions, extending Egypt’s reach into the Sudan and eyeing further expansion. The modern Egypt he and fellow elites imagined was an imperial and cultural force on par with European powers and distinct from sub-Saharan Africa.
The Khedivial Opera House, Aida, and the larger project of urban renewal were not merely Western interventions or meaningless foreign imports. Instead, patronage of all three was a testament to Egyptian cultural achievement and evidence of commensurability with European civilization. Urban design was shaped to fit local needs and architectural patterns. Opera house construction asserted the primacy of Ottoman court culture and power, and the production of Aida presented Egypt as a powerful, imperial force grounded in and legitimated by its ancient history. In effect, the Ottoman-Egyptian court harvested Egypt’s ancient history to claim its own modern authority.
Just as urban design functioned to organize Cairo, making it attractive and navigable both for Egyptians and Egypt’s visitors, so too the opera Aida packaged and presented ancient Egypt in an intelligible and pleasurable manner to its viewers. While the redesign of Cairo involved the implementation of a certain understanding of modernity, the opera Aida delivered that message to viewing audiences. A show of imperialism and power, Aida brought a particular vision of Egypt to life on stage. Everyone and everything—from the building, to the show, to its audience—was part of the spectacle.
Taken together, Aida, the opera house, and the new Cairo facilitated the forging of a modern Egyptian elite and asserted a privileged view of Egyptian identity. In the era preceding Egyptian bankruptcy and British colonial control, Ottoman-Egyptian elites selectively borrowed elements of European and Ottoman culture, fashioning themselves as inheritors of ancient Egyptian imperial greatness. Modernity was imposed from the top down, and renovated streets and the theatrical stage made that modernity visible.
In the nineteenth century, members of the Egyptian elite, including both aʿyan (notability) and dhawat (urban notables), forged a distinct group identity by cultivating a network of social relations in discrete social spaces and by creating markers of difference between themselves and others. Though much of their status derived from wealth and descent, elites, in a place like the new opera house, cultivated “good taste” and fostered bonds of com- munity as they saw and visited one another in their private boxes. Seating arrangements offered a visibility that solidified a sense of being part of a distinct Egyptian social class. This did not require uniformity of thought. Indeed, some pashas (senior civil officials and military officers) complained about being forced to purchase season tickets to opera house performances and personally host and pay for visiting European dancers at their own expense. Nevertheless, the communal experience of attending the theater contributed to cementing a group identity that excluded those who could not or were not interested in participating.
Call for Reviews
If you would like to review the book for the Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya, please email info@jadaliyya.com
Love, Sex, and Desire in Modern Egypt: Navigating the Margins of Respectability
By L.L. Wynn
About the Book
Cairo is a city obsessed with honor and respectability—and love affairs. Sara, a working-class woman, has an affair with a married man and becomes pregnant, only to be abandoned by him; Ayah and Zeid, a respectably engaged couple, argue over whether Ayah’s friend is a prostitute or a virgin; Malak, a European belly dancer who sometimes gets paid for sex, wants to be loved by a man who will not treat her like a whore just because she i’s a dancer; and Alia, a Christian banker who left her abusive husband, is the mistress of a wealthy Muslim man, Haroun, who encourages business by hosting risqué parties for other men and their mistresses.
Set in transnational Cairo over two decades, Love, Sex, and Desire in Modern Egypt is an ethnography that explores female respectability, male honor, and Western theories and fantasies about Arab society. L. L. Wynn uses stories of love affairs to interrogate three areas of classic anthropological theory: mimesis, kinship, and gift. She develops a broad picture of how individuals love and desire within a cultural and political system that structures the possibilities of, and penalties for, going against sexual and gender norms. Wynn demonstrates that love is at once a moral horizon, an attribute that “naturally” inheres in particular social relations, a social phenomenon strengthened through cultural concepts of gift and kinship, and an emotion deeply felt and desired by individuals.
About the Author
L. L. Wynn is an associate professor and head of the Anthropology Department at Macquarie University. She is the author of Pyramids and Nightclubs: A Travel Ethnography of Arab and Western Imaginations of Egypt, from King Tut and a Colony of Atlantis to Rumors of Sex Orgies, Urban Legends about a Marauding Prince, and Blonde Belly Dancers and co-editor of Abortion Pills, Test Tube Babies, and Sex Toys: Exploring Reproductive and Sexual Technologies in the Middle East and North Africa.
In the Media / Scholarly Praise for Love, Sex, and Desire in Modern Egypt
“An important study of double standards in the Arab world.”
The Arab Weekly
Read an interview with the author on NOTCHES
Additional Information
November 2018
344 pages
$29.95 (list price)
Cloth ISBN: 9781477317044
Paper ISBN: 9781477317075
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Chapter Three: “Why Can’t You Study Respectable Women?”
Each of us knew that we were experiencing an immensely exotic—because endlessly deferred—erotic experience, the likes of which we could never hope to match in real life. And that was precisely the point: this was sexuality as a public event, brilliantly planned and executed, yet totally unconsummated and unrealizable. (Said 2001, 349)
After a couple of months of asking around, I finally got an introduction to a belly dancer. Malak was from Spain but had settled in Cairo ten years earlier, and now she gave private and group belly-dance lessons. She knew about my research project, and after a few weeks of attending her dance classes, she invited me to her downtown apartment for an interview.
Her story started, “I was a dancer, an Oriental dancer, long ago.” She had worked all over Europe, she said, at parties and dance demonstrations and stage performances, sometimes flying to London or Rome for a party, but mostly performing in restaurants. While performing at one Lebanese restaurant in Europe, an agent approached her and asked her if she would like to work in Dubai. She was excited but nervous. It was a scary thing back then for a woman to travel alone to Dubai to dance, she said. This was in 1985, the beginning of the oil boom, and Dubai, long before it gained its reputation as a tourist mecca in the Arabian Peninsula, was known as a conservative Gulf country. Few Europeans ventured there. The agent arranged the visa.
In Dubai she mostly performed at hotels and nightclubs, and only once did she dance at a wedding. That was a surprise for her, because she hadn’t realized that weddings there were sex segregated until she was actually on stage, dancing, and started to look around at the audience. She thought to herself, “There is something strange about this audience,” before eventually realizing that there were no men in it. Like many weddings in the Gulf, it was sex segregated, and she was performing only for other women.
As I wrote furiously in my own invented (and therefore not very effective) shorthand, she lit a cigarette, then said, “In Dubai, I also sometimes performed at private parties.”
I looked up from my notes. “Private parties?”
“These are parties that were very special. Where I was not dancing.”
When pressed to explain, she said, “People come from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Their cultures are restrictive, and those who were very, very rich, they would have their own suite of rooms in a hotel, and they would want their own entertainment.” I asked her if she was just speaking about men. “Both men and women would want to be entertained in their hotel suites, but speaking of the men, these people come to Dubai principally to look for alcohol and women. Often they expected to spend the night with me, according to payment.” Sometimes, she said dryly, they would respect the dancer’s desire whether to sleep with them or not. She said that among the dancers, there were plenty of girls who entertained “both on the stage and in the rooms.” Others refused; “they say that they are professionals, performers, and not prostitutes.” Dancers “who are not very classy work as both.”
I asked how she felt about sleeping with these men. She shrugged.
“I have done it from time to time. In principle, I wouldn’t mind if some nice man wanted me to sleep with him and then wanted to give me money for it. The problem,” she continued, laughing, “is that it’s almost never the nice men who want you—it’s always the old, ugly, and disgusting men.”
She described one time when she was asked out by a customer at the nightclub where she performed. They went out to dinner and then returned to his hotel, where they had sex. Afterward, when she had to leave for work, he gave her the equivalent of $3,000, an amount that was even vaster then than it would be now. “I was very confused,” she told me: at once happy to have such a large sum and disgusted by it. She hadn’t gone to his room expecting money. She didn’t consider herself a prostitute. She had gone because she wanted to sleep with the man, and the money made her suddenly rethink the entire experience.
She told another story. Once when she was dancing on stage, a man caught her hand, took the ring off her finger, and didn’t put it back. After her dance, he vanished. She told the manager, “He took my ring!” The manager calmed her, saying, “Don’t worry, he is a very good customer of ours; I’m sure he will give it back.” He came back five days later, and while she was dancing, he took her hand and replaced the ring that he had taken and then put another ring on her other hand. He had taken the first ring to get the correct ring size. The gold ring he gave her had a one-karat diamond in it. She said the man was very nice and extremely rich. He drove a Rolls-Royce. Not long after that he was shot in the head. She shrugged. “Must have been Mafia.”
She said she had no moral objection to sex work. “The only kind of prostitution I cannot stand,” she declared, “is when you are in competition with other people to perform somewhere, and a dancer sleeps with a guy, the manager or person booking the shows at a nightclub, to get the job.” But, she said, “Personally I don’t like prostitution for myself. I like men too much for that. It is a very strange thing to be obliged to touch and kiss someone and feel absolutely nothing for him—you must either hate men or be incredibly materialistic.” She said she sees two types of “call girls”: those who hate men, and those who are materialistic. Some, she said, are “so sweet and superficial”: they do it because they just want nice clothes. “I think these women have a very strange relationship with their body.”
She came to Cairo because succeeding as an “Oriental dancer” in Egypt, where the dance originated, was “consecration” for Western dancers. She settled in Cairo, where she danced for a year. After that, “the market was very bad,” and after so many years of life on stage every day, three or four performances a night, she was tired and wanted to stop, so she decided to teach dancing. Now she performs only occasionally, at private parties.
She stood and wandered to a bookshelf, where she rifled through folders of papers, finding and passing to me a flyer announcing a dance seminar she gave. At first I didn’t recognize the picture on the cover as Malak. She was wearing garish stage makeup that made her eyes look long and flat, pharaonically elongated, rather than beautifully deep set and round as they actually were. The dark lipsticked smile in the picture was not the subtle, hinting smile that she usually wore.
She couldn’t find some other paper she was looking for, so she returned to the couch. She was wearing a net-like short-sleeved shirt and leopard-print pants that suited her wild hair, and her small belly bulged when she sat down. “When you dance on the stage,” she continued, “everyone is looking at you, and not just at your body, also at your face. For the Oriental dancer, the face is very important. You must know the words to every song and pay close attention to the relationship between the words and the expression on your face. Some foreign dancers have no understanding of the words to the song they are performing to. They are absurd. They will put a ridiculous grin on their face while dancing to some mournful line like ‘I have cried so much for you.’ If you don’t understand the music, you cannot communicate with people at all.
“Communication is a critical part of the performance. The Oriental dancer is famous for talking to her clients while on stage and making jokes with them. The dancer must have a great sense of humor and know how to joke around. But,” she continued, “Westerners often imagine the dancer as the fatal woman. But the dancer is not a fatal women. She is a mother.”
“Fatal woman?” We looked at each other uncertainly, and suddenly I realized what she meant. “Do you mean femme fatale? In English, we don’t translate this, we say it in French.”
“Yes, femme fatale. She is not a femme fatale. She is a big Mother.” I could actually hear the capital M when she said that, I thought, as I quickly scribbled my notes.
“The dancer must be able to deal with every situation: a drunk man, a jealous woman, a veiled woman, an unhappy bride, a child. Both men and women are watching the dancer. Some might imagine that it’s mostly the men, but in fact the women are looking at her just as much as the men, maybe more.” Malak thought this all went back to the idea of the mother. “There is a French psychoanalyst, a Moroccan Jew, a Lacanian. Daniel Sibony.” She went to the bookshelf again and pulled out a book entitled Le corps et sa danse. She handed it to me. “He has written about the symbolization of the Oriental dancer. Sibony is the one who says the dancer is the mother. He says that all men, when watching the dancer, feel that she is both umm and umma, mother and motherland. The two main parts of the body of the dancer, the breasts and the hips, these symbolize motherhood.
“I don’t entirely agree,” she continued. “There is a dimension Sibony has forgotten, although perhaps this is included in the concept of mother too. When the dancer makes jokes, there is always sexual connotation in the jokes and songs.” Then she raised her eyebrows and cocked her head, as the smoke trickled up from her joint. “But again, maybe this is part of the mother.”
She took the book from me and flipped through the heavily underlined pages. “Here,” she said, “I will translate. ‘The dance is a ceremony in which emotion goes to the breasts and hips of a woman, symbolizing the mother. This belly is her belly and the belly of the Other, and the Common Belly.’” She pointed to a line in the book. “Here, copy in French.” I wrote, fumbling to get all the accent marks right, “Ce ventre est á la fois le sien et celui de l’Autres ventre commun aussi de la oumma—de la Matrie—jouissant d’elle-même.” While I copied, she stubbed out the rest of her joint.
I handed back the book. “The idea that is most important,” she continued, “is that the dancer is enjoying the movement of her body itself. She takes sensual pleasure in the movement. All the men are brothers, the mother feeds them from her body, like the Arabic language carries and cradles those who use it.” She flipped through the book and handed it to me again. “Copy this.” I hunched over my notebook and wrote, “Elle vibre et chante dans leur corps. Que réveille danseuse dans ces corps d’hommes? L’image—mère assoupie qui se dresse en même temps qu’elle?”
She asked if I had read the work of Karin van Nieuwkerk, a Dutch anthropologist who wrote an ethnography of dancers and singers in Egypt. “According to Van Nieuwkerk, the Oriental dancer is transgressing social rules, since as an entertainer, she is using her body to make money. But in Egypt,” Malak continued, “some dancers are married; they have children. They do the job to make money. Maybe they don’t even really like the job. It’s not such a flashy, showy life as people imagine. It’s just a job that the dancer leaves at the end of the day to come home to her family.”
I thought of Kerim. If he was so insistent that he would never marry a Pomodoro waitress, then how much worse would he consider marriage to a belly dancer? “Most Egyptian men I know say they would never marry a dancer since she is not respectable,” I commented.
Malak nodded knowingly. “Yes, there are many like this. But the great thing about Egyptian society is that you can always find people who are not so obsessed over traditional norms. Also, dancers often marry singers or musicians. They are in the same community, they know how the dancers live, and they don’t have fantasies about the glamorous life and sex with clients. They recognize that it’s a hard job. You get cheated by the manager; you have arguments over pay; you struggle to find work.”
She lit a cigarette and stroked her Persian cat. “There is a kind of man in society who loves to look at women. He looks absolutely like a character from a book of Naguib Mahfouz. He likes drinking, dance, women. He likes life. He goes out every night to see women dancing.
“You know,” she added, “the beautiful thing about this dance in Egypt is that it is not class exclusive. You can find every type of venue. From the most expensive, three hundred pounds an evening, to the cheapest twenty-pound evening. Even a taxi driver can enjoy a dancer. It is no more expensive than a movie and popcorn. There are men from every class who love seeing dancers, who love women. And maybe these,” she said finally, “are the ones who marry a dancer.”
Malak had become restless, constantly moving around and rearranging papers. I thanked her for her time and told her she was an anthropologist’s dream: an informant who knows all the key theorists in the field.
She walked me to the elevator, then stopped the doors from closing. “By the way, would you like to come with me some time to see a dancer perform?” My eyes went wide with excitement. “Good. You see, I have a friend who likes dancers and he knows all the places; he can take us out sometime.” I asked if it was expensive, wondering how I could afford it on my meager research stipend. She smiled her subtle smile and said, “Oh, I think he will pay. This is not something for you to worry about.”
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