Uh I'd like to welcome you to the 14th
year of the UCLA historiography seminar.
We regularly meet. We meet once a quarter
uh and bring in what uh is cutting edge
historiography.
Uh today we are very pleased to have uh
Raphael Cormack. He is a writer, historian,
and translator. He has a PhD from the
University of Edinburgh
uh in Egyptian theatre from what I
understand.
Uh he's edited two collection of short
stories and he translated from the
Arabic, The Book of Khartoum with Max
Shmookler. And the Book of Cairo. His
articles have appeared in the London Review
of Books, the LA Review of Books, Apollo
Magazine and elsewhere. And his first
book, Midnight in Cairo, was released this
year– earlier this year. I gotta say, you
know, I rarely read books about the
Middle East for pleasure.
Uh this one, I started out reading just
to figure out what what it was all about.
And I ended up just sort of like glued
to it. This is an extraordinary story
which we'll talk about today.
And so without further Ado, Raphael.
Great okay. This looks good.
Uh so I mean there's a there's a bunch
of things that I could talk about today
and I'm very happy to answer questions
about any of them, but I try to sort of
narrow it down to one particular point.
And that is really one of the one of the
focuses of the book if not perhaps the
main focus which is how we tell the
story of 20th century early 20th century
Egypt through the lives of its female
stars, performers, singers, dancers and so
forth. On your left here is Mounira al-Mahdeyya
from the 1920s of her who is just one of
the several women who is in the book.
And so I'm going to start actually with
this picture, which kind of
represents one of the impetuses for
writing this book. And anyone who goes
through periodicals and newspapers from
the 1920s in Egypt and really just in
just about anywhere will notice that men
and largely men-only gatherings are
extremely common and prominent and
happen in places where the decisions get
made. I think these more or less at
random from the Egyptian press and they
represent uh on the top left that's the
meaning of the Muslim Brotherhood but
that's also on the left there that's a
group of students at Cairo University
going on a tour of the uh sites in Upper
Egypt, then various other kind of
cultural and political groups. And you will notice,
there are men everywhere.
And this has not only been noticed by me.
People have tried to
counter this a bit – I mean many people
before me are not the first to do it and
particularly they focus on the
mainstream feminist movement which
starts to rise in the late 19th century
in Egypt and really gathers steam
through the 1910s and into the 1920s. uh
there's a picture of [...] there, famous
female writer. And a tea party at Huda Sha'rawi
house, a sort of lecture. And
thé politique, uh Huda Sha'rawi of course,
one of the most famous would be most
famous Egyptian feminists of the 20th
century. Uh and here's a book here by
Marilyn Booth, someone who will come back
to uh about Zaynab Fawwaz and her
writing of of female lives. So in kind of
elite spaces this
has been covered by many people but what
I've found and how I already came to
this book was
that in the nightlife, in the cabarets, in
the theaters and and the uh seedy clubs of
Cairo, there was an alternative story to
be found.
And uh there are several other women's
lives, women's lives which tend to not
really have made it into much scholarly
work but were happening at the same time
as people like Huda Sha'rawi was having
her political teas, [XXX] was
having her famous salons in the
nightclubs. Uh women were
creating their own lives and their lives
are being documented and told uh in so
in Midnight in Cairo, my recent book. I've
tried to tell some of the uh the more uh
interesting and flamboyant ones because,
now we'll go back to this slide as uh,
Marilyn Booth has said in her book on
political on women's biography in the
20th century in Egypt, often these
biographies which appeared in newspapers,
in more kind of elite circles. Uh they
formed an elite strategy of pushing the
boundaries of patriarchy but as she says
only so far. So a lot of these
feminist movements were very constrained
by how far they could how they could
push things whereas the women of these
nightclub stages were willing to push a
little bit further. One of my one of my
favorite stories from the book is the
story of Rose al Yusuf, the woman who
later went on to edit and create a
magazine named after herself but who in
the 1910s was a female actress like uh
like many others. She was part of a
theater troop run by this man Talaat Harb,
uh famous,
uh very prominent nationalist,
capitalist. Essentially he put a lot
of his money into Egyptian Capital. So he
helped set up Bank [...] for the
uh National Bank as well as printing
presses and he was also extremely
invested in cultural movements. So he
funded a theater troupe that Rose
al Yusuf was appearing in. And in Rose
al Yusuf's memoirs, she tells a story of how
at one point during the break between
gigs, she is sitting with the rest of the
theater troop in a swimming costume and
Talaat Harb, the founder of the troop
comes along and tells her that she is
pushing the limits rather too much and
that she should not be appearing– a
member of his troop should not appear on
the beach dressed in what he deemed as
revealing costume. And instead of backing
down, she tells how she quit the troop on
the spot and then hung out at the beach
for several more days just to annoy Talaat
Harb. So there's a sense that that a lot
more is being pushed in a lot of these
stories than there are in these more
Elite circles. And that's another great
quote that I love uh just from an
interview with another actress from 1928
in which he goes on a long diatribe
against marriage how she's– because they
ask her whether she's going to get
married and she says no. She's
happy to have lots of love affairs but
she doesn't want to get married. And she
ends by shouting, "Down with marriage. Long
Live Love." uh again I think you'll agree
for the 1920s, a pretty radical statement
and there's lots of things going on like
this. And it's a really rich vein of
material.
But what I want to do in this talk,
having laid out the kind of
opportunities that this period
presents is to just go through some of
the issues, methodological,
historiographical, about trying to write
the lives of some of these women of the
nightclub stages.
So the first question uh that we um
we really want to get to is what sources
do we use essentially. I mean slightly
dull framing of that but it's an
important question, how can we tell these
stories– where do they even come from?
Do we have archives? I mean now
it's very difficult uh in the Middle
East to um to find stories like these in
in archives partly because uh as Edward
Said notes here in a article he wrote
about uh Tahia Kariokka, a woman who
features in the book, a dancer who really
came of age in the 1940s. He says,
"None of the Arab countries I know have
proper State archives, public record
offices, or official libraries any more
of them any more than any of them has
decent control over their monuments or
antiquities, the history of their cities
or individual works of
architecture-- mosques, palaces, schools. What
I have a sense of is a sprawling teeming
history off the page out of sight and
hearing, beyond reach, largely
unrecoverable. And people who work in the
Middle East of course know that archives
are sometimes extremely difficult to
access and navigate but in
the case in fact of the nightlife a lot
of these stories are things which would
not appear in in any archives. They're
the things that happen you know late
night after dark in a smoky Cabaret. Not
the kind of thing that gets preserved in
an archive. So where can we go uh. I mean
one potential, which I didn't really ever
manage to access is a family archive. So
I mean Edward Said in that article
continues uh that our history is mostly
written by foreigners, visiting scholars,
intelligence agents,
um while we rely on personal
disorganized Collective memory, gossip
almost, and the embrace of a family or
noble community to carry us forward in
time.
um and I think this is true. I include
here a picture of Mounira al-Mahdeyya, the woman
who was on the opening slide in her
later years clearly surrounded by an
archive that she has kept, these are play
scripts in fact. the first is uh there's
a script then there's of the musical
notation from another script and
various other papers that we don't know
what they are. They have no idea what
happened to these papers but it's quite
possible they survived somewhere and I
don't know where they are.
Um if we did get our hands on them
obviously there are
problems and issues with
family archives, personal archives, family
history things that and I just give a
quick reference there uh that Sherene
Seikaly who's in Santa Barbara has talked
about recently in writing about her
own great grandfather. The role of shame
and so forth which is something we could
talk about in Q and A if you want. But for
now I'm going to get on to where we do
find the stories.
One extremely popular, I mean one
extremely useful place that I found
while doing this
research for this book was the
entertainment press. Often actually
neglected but there's, but it's as you
see from this picture extremely rich uh
both in French and in Arabic throughout
the 1920s and 30s. New magazines started
uh sometimes only lasting a year or two,
in a few cases only lasting a week or
two uh but some of them lasting for many
years. And they're full of
bits of information about uh the female
celebrities of Cairo – like the
women who I was interested in.
Um they're they're really fascinated
with details of their lives and these
are just a few articles from both Rosa al
Yusuf and uh from [...] magazine to
his most prominent ones in which you can
see uh people– they're asking about
actresses' opinions on Love and Marriage,
about uh what they eat, uh what they do
in the first hour after they wake up. uh
several several articles like this one
on the far right about what their houses
were like. Uh so here's the house of Mary
Mansour or an actress at the time and
dancer. But almost every single celeb
female celebrity at the time had someone
come into their house and write a little
article about it. Uh oftentimes, women are
the focus. So there's a lot of male
celebrities, a lot of female celebrities.
But it's the female celebrities who have
their lives really picked apart and I
think anyone who reads the celebrity
press now will find that a familiar kind
of topic it's uh it's women who are who
are the main focus. Sometimes as you'll
see here, uh it is their physical
appearance which is dissected in
really some length. So on the on the left
it has a long part a series of Articles
actually who is the most beautiful
actress in Egypt and other another on
the right uh rather more disparaging one
who is the ugliest actress in Egypt. And
frequently, it is the appearance of the
actresses the gets picked apart.
Often there is rather too much
information given, which for a historian
and you know the people researching the
period is sometimes completely
fascinating. So on this article in the
right for instance we have details about
what every star of the stage is earning,
how much money they get, is uh Fatima Rushdi
one of the the big stars of the
period who earns 20 pounds a month. She's
the uh the first actress in [....] troupe
and it
transpires actually going through
this article that actresses are not paid
very well at all and some of them are
finding it really hard to make ends
Meet. It's only really the big stars who
get paid a lot of money, who managed to
make a lot of money. And then these two
articles on the or to the left of that
is actually one article of two pages,
just shows again how much detail these
magazines go into and they they give
here the respective weights of all the
female stars of the time.
um
so that's all of that we have that's
which is both uh a little bit disturbing
uh but also around my realm of
primary information and how exactly you
deal with that uh is is a big question
which um which I'll be happy to discuss
but it's not only articles about stuff
that we have in these newspapers. We also
get articles by the Stars uh often. So
here as is Aziza Amir, one of the founders of
Egyptian Cinema has written a mini part
series about her her life story, how she
grew up uh what she did in her teenage
years. how she got into the acting
business. so on and so forth and this
autobiographical work is something I'll
come back to.
But there are a lot of problems with
using these magazines as sources as well
as sort of the uh the fact that some of
the information is a little bit
disturbing. And one of them is how
true are any of these little articles
that that we find these are very gossipy
articles uh. And you will find quite
often uh articles that tell a long story,
uh quite a salacious one, are followed up
a week or two later with a correction as
is the case still now. Uh so here is a is
a fun article about this actor on the
left there. Ahmed [...] who was making a
name for himself in Germany. Rose al Yusuf
magazine alleges that he's
arrested uh with hashish in his house by
the German police and you know they
allege all these kind of things that
he's traveling on various passports, you
know good uh nice fun story about the
time uh. But then a couple of weeks later
they are forced to issue a retraction
because Ahmed [...]'s brother has come
into their offices and told them that
it's all a lie. Now exactly who we
believe in all of this uh is hard to say.
I mean I, my general approach when
writing about it was that stories like
this had value because people who were
attending the cabarets, who went out to
watch films or go to theaters would know
these stories and would know that there
had been a story for instance about
Ahmad [...] arrested with a bunch of
hashish and would take that to the
performance. But whether or not strictly
speaking it happened is a question that
we sort of have to answer and a question
that comes up a lot when using these
1920s entertainment magazines as
sources.
Um also
and sort of connected to that, uh there
is the idea that uh a lot of these lives
that the women were leading at the time
were as much a performance as these
shows that they put on or and the
theaters. So again we will come back to Mounira al-Mahdeyya
who is there in the middle.
She um
she was extremely invested in her own
construction as a celebrity uh and would
for instance here let's take pictures of
herself uh dressed up as a man
frequently and send them into the press
as well as being famous on the left for
taking male parts uh in the theater and
part of all of this was about her
very conscious self-construction and how
how we deal with that again is a is
another important question to answer
particularly uh as I said before uh as
this whole scene is as much kind of
performance as any of the plays that
are going on.
Um so that's
there's those issues that we come across
when we are talking about these
celebrity magazines which are
nonetheless a uh a really rich vein of
material and stories to plug into.
The other really crucial piece of
you know source material that we need to
tell all these stories of the 1920s are
the celebrity memoirs that usually came
out towards the end of a celebrity's
life. Here's Rose al Yusuf. Is a picture
on the top left. Uh her memoirs came out in
the 1950s after she had retired both
from the stage and from journalism.
Almost every Star of this period wrote
some kind of autobiographical writing
whether it was as we saw before those
articles in the press and at the time or
whether at the end of their career they
sat down like uh Rose al Yusuf did and like
this man on the bottom right [...]
and wrote up their life
stories. There's almost all of them did
it and they're full again of really
fascinating little vignettes and stories.
so that story about Rose al Yusuf and Talaat Harb
from her memoirs. But also they are full
of pitfalls,
um. Like the uh the press at the time we
have certain kind of uh basic questions
of of sources uh that we need to ask
about, some of them so for instance who
are they filtered through. In the case of [...]
a great cabaret owner
dancer. The case of her memoirs, they
appear to have been told to this
journalist [...] and then written
up by her. So it says [...].
So it's not [...] herself writing these
memoirs, exactly what this means uh it's
hard to say and exactly how it is
filtered, we need to we think. Uh also
that's a question of exactly which
version of someone's life we're reading.
I mean in this in this kind of matter,
Fatima Rushdi is the really key
example. Uh Fatima Rushdi, who you will
perhaps remember from just before
earning 20 Egyptian pounds a week in the
mid-1920s went on to become a massive
star, start her own theater troupe, but
she in the space of around
less than 10 years really, she published
four different sets of memoirs uh, some
serialized in a magazine, others like [...]
is sort of filtered
through a journalist and two more
published in the same year, both written
by her um unclear presumably written by her and
then authored another uh book
about a collaborator of hers as his aid but
which included a lot of biographical
material. So when confronted with this,
the question of exactly which version of
the life story we're looking at is you
know, is important. So there's all these
kind of questions. Another one is is this
a genuine version uh in the case of
Naguib el-Rihani another big star uh this
Egyptian writer [..] Yousef has
alleged that one version of his Memoirs
which is circulating is in fact
fabricated. And this one which he
published is the really true Memoir of
Naguib el-Rihani.
Um so there's all those issues but when
we come to memoirs of uh of these female
stars there's also a few bigger perhaps
more conceptual uh issues that we need
to look at, I mean so really they can all
be summed up with the question of how do
you write a life. And when you are a
female star at the end of your career,
what expectations are there on you for
your for your life story? What do you do
when you sit down to write your memoirs?
What kind of narratives are already
inbuilt uh What uh kind of
constraints do you have upon you? What
kind of stories are you almost forced to
tell? And what kind of stories are you
not forced to tell them? Where is their
creativity? Where isn't there? so in a
very simple kind of basic level of this
a lot of these stories include
sort of cliches and exaggerations and
what I've called sticky people or events
so it's often uh the bigger the star the
more famous kind of the person the more
likely they are to appear in someone's
memoirs. So [...] often has a walk-on
part uh and the you know great singer
songwriter [...] died
very young, also people really want to
put him in their memoirs. So he comes in
a lot. Uh another uh writer Frédéric
LaGrange uh has gone even further and
said uh, this is Mounira al-Mahdeyya
that she is linked in the imaginary of
journalists and the Arab Collective
unconscious uh to an era in which people
drank champagne from the shoes of the
Mutriba and lit cigars with banknotes,
Of course, these nonsensical cliches
probably born from the years between
World War one and World War II in
America and Europe, and hide the scarcity
information. So there's a lot of stories,
kind of are so cliche that they find their way
into stories but there are bigger points
than this. And like I was saying, what
kind of stories did people want to tell.
And you notice when going through uh
memoirs of a lot of these female stars
of the period, that they fit very similar
patterns. I mean one thing that often
comes up is that
these women uh often portray themselves
as exceptional and and one of a kind.
This is clearest uh probably in the case
of Fatima Rushdi uh pictured there on the
left uh who's caught a couple of times
already in this talk in her memoirs
there is essentially no mention. I mean
one or two very short mentions near the
beginning of her sisters, Ensaf and
Ratiba who were themselves big stars of
The Nightlife stage in Cairo in the
1920s and 30s. They weren't actresses so
much as they were they ran a cabaret and
put on Cabaret nights, but they were very
successful, very well known and important
figures in the period. But they just do
not appear anywhere really in
Fatima Rushdi's memoirs and
and that's struck me as very strange uh
but then if you sort of notice that, you
start to notice that in very few of
these Memoirs do we really see many
close female friendships. Uh and
particularly for women in this period
you imagine that these close
friendships must have existed but
somehow this form of memoir is uh forces
people to see themselves as either you
know the first woman to uh act in a
certain uh play, or the first Muslim
woman to act on stage. the first Egyptian
woman to act on stage and lots of women
like to claim that uh title.
But in some ways that sort of forced
into it. Likewise actually, they all come
from very similar family backgrounds.
There's a there's a big pattern of their
fathers dying uh when they are very
young, something perhaps we could talk
about afterwards, and crucially for me they all
have very similar endings.
Uh this is uh the thing I'm calling the
Shafiqa al-Qibtiyya problem uh because and I was
gonna play this little clip but I think
I will not so we uh so we end enough
time for some questions.
There is a big problem
or pattern shall we say in the lives of
these women and it starts, to sum it up
very sort of crudely, it starts with a
start in adversity– often as I said their
fathers have died, they make their way
into Cairo's entertainment business, uh
they become extremely successful, they
end up owning a cabaret, running it if
there's a troop, you know making lots of
money out of their records. And they hit
their peak uh often in quite
transgressive ways. There's a quite a
focus on how you know fun learning they
were and how much of a great time they
have and then it ends with
tragedy. They're sort of alone and
abandoned at the end of their lives and
and a big trope is that only
five you know X number X small number of
people ever attend their funeral. Uh this
is a kind of trope that restarts with
Shafiqa al-Qibtiyya
uh who is a big star of the 1890s
Cabaret scene and then is always said uh
how she ends up perhaps addicted to
drugs, uh perhaps having abandoned the
son who she loved, and all this kind of
thing in penury and misery. And this
is a story uh even if you don't read the
stories of the women of Cairo's
nightlife that I think people will know
you know. It's not too dissimilar for
instance from a kind of tragic Marilyn
Monroe story, uh the same story is also
told of of Jean Rhys, the novelist. It's a
very common story that is told of women
particularly, uh extremely successful
women. And there's a there's a certain sense
that there's a moral behind this narrative
pattern. And and the moral is essentially
the one that the these stories sort of
want us to believe is that transgression
might be great when you're a big
successful star of the stage but at the
end, it always seems to lead to
loneliness and tragedy. And the question
that I ask myself frequently
whilst rewriting this book is, am I
re-inscribing this narrative on the lies
of these women or, you know, to put it
another way. Is there a different way to
tell these stories? I mean in a certain
sense, they're they're kind of traps of a
biographical pattern. Of course every
life story ends with a death if you tell it
narratively, you know and chronologically
speaking and no death is really an
extremely happy moment except perhaps of [...]
And there's a million people are
Attending your funeral. Otherwise death is
generally speaking a tragic end so is
there a way to escape this? Uh also uh as
it's not been lost on me,
I am a man who was writing about uh
women of this period.
And maybe there is some kind of
subconscious way in which I am
re-inscribing a kind of patriarchal
narrative again. Uh I'm very happy to
talk about this in the Q and A, but I just
give you a little quote from uh Fatima [...]
another great singer, we've had a
lot of great singers of the period and
haven't been able to tell you quite
enough about them uh but I'm happy to
talk more about it but she in a series
again of autobiographical writings that
she published in 1926 related to the
lawsuit that she was launching against [...]
Son in order to get him to
confirm paternity of her child. She
addresses male authors directly and says
"All you male authors who write about the
female psyche, not one of you has ever
been a woman, so how do you know anything
about the female psyche. And I include"
this quote uh just to point out uh and
that this issue of whether
men can really write about women's lives
is nothing new. And it's something that a
lot of these women in the period were
acutely aware of themselves and one that
I have struggled with and would be happy
to talk more about.
um so that is
the two remaining sources that we have to
tell the stories of these really
exceptional female lives.
And each of them come with their own
benefits but also come with their own
downsides. One thing just before I
quickly come to a conclusion that I
would also like to add is that one
hidden downside of these two sources is
that there are women who fall between
the cracks, uh the unsuccessful uh women
who never got to write Memoirs who could
not be easily categorized, who often
didn't appear in the press. And there are
hundreds of stories that I passed in
this,
in doing the research that I just simply
couldn't tell because there was not
enough information.
One of my um favorite
uh women who I couldn't really talk
about was this woman called Efranz [...].
name who was Turkish or Armenian, the
newspapers Just disagree uh on that, who
had come from Syria to Egypt to perform
in the nightclubs and always seem to be
surrounded by a little bit of trouble.
There were stories that you know back in
Aleppo she– a man had stabbed someone
else out of jealousy for her and then
when she came to Egypt people were
always telling telling how she would
start fights. Someone tried to get her
kicked out of the country and it's only
Naguib el-Rihani who saved her. That's all
these little tiny tidbits of her– a life,
an extremely fascinating life an
important life well lived but was just
seem to have fallen through the cracks
because she never got to write her own
memoirs, perhaps because as either
Armenian or Turkish, she didn't quite fit
the uh the national narrative that was
really rising in the 50s and 60s. And
there's many other many people like Nadira
who was an
extremely famous and successful star but
about whose life we know relatively
little and others. And what were their
stories look like? Uh they would
certainly be less triumphant uh probably
less positive than the stories I've been
able to tell uh. There's a woman Diana
Abbani who was doing some work on this
which I've just given a quick link to
which I'm happy to send around the link
again who's written about the one page
long life stories that appear in this uh
Lebanese newspaper al-Asifa that tell
the story of really unsuccessful uh
Cabaret Stars. So she's doing some very
interesting work on that so hopefully
some more will come out of it.
But not to end on on a sad note or a
negative note.
One thing that really,
I found fascinating writing this and the
thing that really propelled me into
writing the story was that there is this
okay problematic but extremely rich vein
of women's lives which are not usually
told. Different kinds of women, not well
educated very few of them had any formal
education uh a few of them could even
read a lot of them actually have to
learn to read in order to appear in
these plays who had very different
concerns from the more elite uh
feminists who were who are used to
reading about. Uh so
to end on a more exciting note, I'd like
to say that maybe this is not only just
a new way of looking at women's lives
but a new way of looking at the whole
period. And when you look at the period
through The Eyes of female stars of of
Cairo's nightlife, a totally new set of
issues concerns problems and new sets of
stories really emerge. So here I end on
this little cartoon of [...] sweeping
away all these nice uh educators,
sweeping away essentially one of the
mantles that we looked at in the in the
first slide. So there's a great world of opportunity out
there. I hope in my book that I began to
delve into it but there's so much more
to get into, so an exciting time.
This is all very awkward and very very
new doing this via zoom. It was a
great talk and I really want to thank
you for for your presentation. I would
encourage everybody to get a copy of the
book because that way you'll not only
see you know the making of the sausage
but actually the sausage itself at the
very end.
So thank you very much. A pleasure, a real
pleasure.