Woman as nation

Hoda Elsadda, Wednesday 27 Sep 2023

Remembering the feminist icon Latifa al-Zayyat on the centenary of her birth.

Latifa al-Zayyat

 

Latifa al-Zayyat (1923-1996) occupies a unique place in the Arabic cultural field. In the nationalist narrative, she is the exemplary committed Arab intellectual, having participated in the national liberation movement against colonialism, and continued her fight for freedom and justice throughout her career as a writer, academic and political activist.

Al-Zayyat’s involvement in political protest started at an early age in 1946 when, while still a student, she was elected secretary general of the National Committee of Students and Workers.  In 1979, she co-founded and became President of the Committee for the Defense of National Culture, which consisted of a group of writers and intellectuals who opposed President Anwar Sadat’s peace treaty with Israel, and organised to raise awareness of the dangers of the normalising relations with Israel in the cultural sphere.

She was imprisoned twice: first in 1949, when she was charged with conspiring to topple the regime; and again in 1981, amongst more than 1,500 prominent public and opposition figures arrested by Sadat, charged with conspiring with a foreign country. Sayyid al-Bahrawy pays tribute to her for being “a rare model among Arab women who engage in a struggle for liberation” and for possessing traits “that unite her with the general lot of Arab nationalist intellectuals.” She also figures strongly in the Arab feminist narrative as a role model and inspiration to women writers in search of a tradition of women writing in Arab culture.

Her best-known novel, Al-Bab al-maftuh (The Open Door), published in 1960, is a period piece that typifies the revolutionary fervour and optimism of the 1950s, in the aftermath of the 1952 revolution by the Free Officers, the evacuation of British forces and the mobilisation of resistance to the Tripartite Aggression against Egypt in 1956.  Al-Bab al-maftuh has received wide recognition in Arab literary history because of the link established between national liberation and the liberation of women, a cornerstone of nationalist discourse.

The events of the novel begin in 1946 with the mass demonstrations that took place on 21 February in Tahrir (then Ismailia) Square against British presence in Egypt, and ends in 1956, celebrating the resistance movement against the Tripartite Aggression on Egypt by Israel, France and Britain in Port Said. A chronicle of key events in a decisive period in the history of anti-colonial resistance frames the coming-of-age of Layla, a young woman from a middle-class background, and defines her journey towards the attainment of a new consciousness that befits the model of the new – national – woman.

There is a direct link between the public and the private: Layla’s journey towards freedom parallels the nation’s journey towards independence; her private struggle with her family, with tradition, with stereotypical roles imposed on women, corresponds to the national struggle against colonialism and exploitation. Al-Zayyat situates Layla at the centre of events as she contributes and is a key player in three simultaneous and interlinked battles: a feminist battle for women’s freedom; a Marxist battle against middle-class morality and the primacy of the family as a locus of tradition and power; and the larger anti-colonial battle. The national struggle against colonialism acts as the impetus and driving force enabling individual selves to overcome personal and class restrictions.

In fact, every phase of the national struggle brings about a transformation in Layla towards knowledge and self-awareness and helps her to break loose of the chains of class and family. The novel is concluded on an upbeat tone: the resistance movement is victorious and the invading armies withdraw; at the same time Layla gains self-confidence as a woman and her ability to have an equal relationship with Husayn, a friend of her brother’s and her comrade in the resistance movement. The novel epitomises an idealism that imbued the late 1950s and early 1960s in Egypt, based on dreams of prosperity and independence. It represents an optimistic worldview on the national as well as on the personal level. “Al-Bab al-maftuh,” al-Zayyat said in 1990, “was the door of people, the door of the nation.”

With the change of mood in the 1960s, and the overwhelming sense of frustration and disillusionment in the wake of the 1967 defeat, al-Zayyat went through a phase of artistic silence, which lasted until 1986, when a collection of short stories, al-Shaykhukha (Old Age), appeared, followed by more writing in the 1990s: an autobiography, Hamlit taftish: awraq shakhsiyya (1992; English translation: The Search: Personal Papers, 1997); a play, Bay‘ wa shira’ (1994; Buying and Selling); a novel, Sahib al-bayt (1994; English translation: The Owner of the House, 1997); and a novella, al-Rajul al-lathi ‘arafa tuhmatahu, (1995; The Man who knew what he was charged for).

The hiatus has been interpreted in many different ways, and specifically by al-Zayyat herself, as a form of self-inflicted “political censorship”. Was al-Zayyat’s silence caused by her disillusionment with a nationalist discourse that was ambivalent and contradictory on the position of women, her position, in the national struggle? A reading of Sahib al-bayt provides an answer to this question: it is a powerful feminist critique of Third World nationalist politics regarding gender equality.

Al-Zayyat published Sahib al-bayt in 1994, but she began writing the novel in 1962, immediately after she finished writing Al-Bab al-maftuh. In Hamlit taftish, al-Zayyat tells us that Sahib al-bayt was originally called “The Apricot Tree”, and was a book in which she wanted to write about the period during which the police chased her and her husband, forcing them into hiding. She had wanted to portray the “victory of fallible human beings” over all kinds of societal oppression, and decided to use juxtaposition as a structural element. The chase was going to end with prison, “that is failure at the material level, whereas failure was in fact a spiritual victory, whereby human beings flourish despite very harsh circumstances, and the soft and fragile apricot flowers bloom out of rough wooden stems.”

As the writing of the novel developed, she moved away from her original plan, and the novel took on the title Al-Rihla (The Journey), “a metaphor for the journey of man from birth to death.”  She found herself unable to complete the novel and could not discover the essential flaw, which became clear to her only later, after she had been divorced. Her analysis of the flaw in the novel is worth quoting in full:

The vision in this novel was a tortured vision. It was my vision during a period in my marriage, but it was strange and alien to the overall development of my life. In this novel, man is an asocial individual: his freedom constitutes a burden that only he can carry. He is an ahistorical individual who finds himself thrown into an ahistorical position. His ahistoricity is concretized by his eternal isolation and eternal loneliness. For this individual, the other represents hell. 

In the novel, the individual acts, but his actions ... lack justification and reconstruct neither reality nor the self. Action in this novel is incidental, not accumulative.  It is not the action of a well-developed character with a history, neither does it build a well-balanced character which undertakes actions that extend from the past to the present and into the future.”

Sahib al-bayt is about the journey of Samia, wife of a member of a political opposition group in Egypt, towards self-knowledge. The plot revolves around her going into hiding with her husband, who has just escaped prison and is being chased by the police.  They are accompanied by their friend, a fellow rebel, who has organised the escape, and plays a major role in planning their course of action.

Although Samia took a conscious risk when she married her husband in defiance of her family, she is nevertheless not allowed by the two men to share or even to know about the important decisions that have to be taken during their escapade. Her exclusion from the confidence of her partners in the escape evoke recollections of other moments in her life, which accumulate in her consciousness and gradually lead to a moment of revelation.

The linear events of the plot are laden with layers of experience and emotional struggles as the novelist uses the stream of consciousness technique to give each event historical and psychological depth. The result of this technique is crucial to the vision of the novel: it establishes an unmistakable correlation between the oppressive attitudes of Samia’s comrades on the one hand, and the social and familial oppression she suffered all her life on the other. The narrative technique also makes it quite clear that the main reason for Samia’s oppressive exclusion is her gender. The novel guides the reader to recognise different kinds of gender discrimination practised against women, by society, by the family, and also by partners in a struggle for liberation.

The title of Sahib al-bayt refers to the owner of the house in which Samia and her husband hide from the police. Samia’s tense encounter with the landlord brings back memories of other domineering figures in her life: “the one-and-only ruler? ... her father?  ... the preacher in the mosque threatening people with fire and a dire destiny? ... the teacher telling her to extend her hand to receive punishment?” The landlord in the novel is the sum total of cultural and societal values and structures that perpetrate the oppression of women.

It is my contention that one of the reasons for al-Zayyat’s literary silence was her struggle with the ideological blind spots of a nationalist discourse she subscribed to vis a vis women’s rights and their status in social movements. Al-Shaykhukha, published in the mid 1980s, brings her closer to self-knowledge and allows her to face her demons, so to speak.

Gradually, she reaches a point in her life, armed with a long history of struggle, and a highly valued career, where she is able to voice the unsaid. Sahib al-bayt is al-Zayyat’s final work and her masterpiece. It is also a landmark in the history of Arab women’s writing. After confronting the social and cultural restrictions that forced her to suppress her identity as a woman, she also faced the political taboos that prevented her from criticising the gender hierarchies within national liberation movements.

In a testimonial delivered in 1990 at a Forum for Women’s Creative Writing in Fez, and published in 1994 in Adab wa Naqd, al-Zayyat directly addresses the stigma associated with the title feminist or women’s literature:

I am a woman, and this in my view is an important element in the definition of the self…

Our creative writing is consequently different from writing by male writers who belong to the same society. It might be on the same level artistically, or it might be better or worse, but in all cases it will be different. Why was it so hard for us to admit this difference? Why did I, and why do we, stubbornly deny any attempt to classify my creative work as women’s or feminist literature? ...

I entrenched myself, like all women writers, in the trenches of literature. I persistently refused to have my creative writing classified as women’s literature.  It is either literature, or not literature, art or not art. There is no such thing as male literature and female literature. I said this over and over again to anyone who posed the question, just like all Arab women writers do. These statements were made in self defence, against persistent efforts in our Arab world to classify the literature written by women in a lesser artistic and literary status compared to literature written by men; against the use of the category “women’s literature” in a derogatory manner to undermine its importance …

This article is based on the chapter entitled “Latifa al-Zayyat: Gender and Nationalist Politics,” in Gender Nation and the Arabic Novel: Egypt 1892-2008 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press; and Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2012).


* A version of this article appears in print in the 28 September, 2023 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly

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