The Open Door

About The Open Door by Marilyn Booth

When Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal for Egypt on July 26, 1956, the Arab world heralded him as a hero, and globally he became a celebrated symbol of resistance to the European imperialist march that had for so long forcibly shaped the lives of so many. The moment marked a period of consolidation and triumph for ‘Abd al-Nasser’s regime, and it ended a decade of turbulent political activity in an Egypt that was trying to free itself of both British oversight and the political system of the past. As much as it was a decade of struggle, of disillusionment and hardship, it was also a decade of youth activism and of popular optimism about the future of a newly independent country. And it is the decade that Latifa al-Zayyat chronicles in her classic, ﬁrst novel, The Open Door. Published in 1960, the novel appeared as that earlier optimism was wearing off, after a period in which ‘Abd al-Nasser’s regime had imprisoned many of its opponents and had strictly curtailed freedom of expression and the right to organize. Signiﬁcant and crucial strides made in land reform were, if not wholly offset by, at least tempered by, a sense of drift and uncertainty. Yet the memory of recent triumphs was still fresh, and a young generation grappling with its collective identity welcomed what was a bold and innovative literary work. Like Egyptian men, Egyptian women had been writing and publishing ﬁction since before the turn of the twentieth century. But to confront issues of personal freedom and sexuality in the context of received social expectations and the constraints of political inertia, economic travail, and class—and to do so as a woman writing about female experience—was new and shocking, no less so than the bold step of describing the physicality of male and female adolescent and post-adolescent sexual awakening, as al-Zayyat does in this novel. A later generation of writing women remembers reading—or hearing about—The Open Door as a formative experience. Remarked novelist Hala Badri in a reminiscence (al-Bahrawi, ed., 1996) offered to a conference on al-Zayyat held shortly before her death in 1996:

In my childhood, the name ‘Latifa al-Zayyat’ echoed around me as one of the icons of national liberation. The great writer remained in my imagination merely a name, until the ﬁlm version of The Open Door came out. Our home witnessed many conversations about the boldness of its themes. The adults re-read the novel . . . and began to discuss it. What arrested them was not the point that choosing the way one lives privately is inseparable from public commitment, but rather the courageous conclusions that emerge through the dialogues. For conversations between the heroine and her female cousin hint that a woman’s body becomes parched when her relationship with a man is unsatisfying. This might appear obvious to us now, but at that time it was startling and provocative. The women around me were quietly thankful to this woman who had been able to express an experience that they could not articulate out loud though it was common among them. Thus, The Open Door did not simply broach a single signiﬁcation; it sparked heated debate in many homes, among them mine—just an ordinary home in Cairo.

Al-Zayyat’s novel was one of a few novels by Arab women that appeared around the same time, landmark works such as the Lebanese writer Layla al-Ba‘albaki’s novel I Live, that heralded the present explosion of feminist writing in the Arab world and the entry of female Arab writers into the modern literary canon. Because this entry remains unfamiliar to most outside the Arab world, it is worth tracing that history at the risk of repeating what close observers know.

Referring to a body of literature and other creative arts that is recognized as emblematic of the dominant ideology, values, and organization of social forces in a given society, a canon is thus inseparable from—indeed, it is often central to—struggles over political power and economic and social processes and structures. Thus, a canon is also a vision of ‘the way things ought to be’ that constructs an image of the society’s past as perfect, as an ideal. A canon cannot be a ﬁxed entity but rather is a process, a site of struggle over the power to name what is central to cultural and political deﬁnition. The canon of Arabic literature in the twentieth century, like that of any literature, is always subject to pressure and always in re-formation (as is the way Arabic literature is inserted into ‘world literature’ by Euro/American publishers and critics). As a shifting body of texts, a canon can be usefully examined by looking at its margins (which are also unstable). Literary marginality is of course bound up in social and political marginalization. Women writers have had to ﬁght their marginality—their marginalization—but they have also used marginality as a privileged position, one that widens their gaze and the modes of expression available to them. Ironically, as marginalization along both gender and class lines has come increasingly to shape texts by contemporary women ﬁction writers, those writers have themselves become more accepted as part of the ‘mainstream’ canon.

In her autobiographical meditation, Hamlat taftish: awraq shakhsiya (Operation Search: Personal Papers, 1992), the Egyptian ﬁction writer, political activist, and literary scholar Latifa al-Zayyat (1923–96) presents her childhood in the Delta cities of Dimyat (Damietta) and Mansura as an entry point into a dynamic of withdrawal versus engagement that she sees as marking her adult life. The rooftops of her childhood homes take on complex symbolic meaning: mysterious because they are initially unattainable, they become sites of desire, refuges, places of imagined freedom from the constraints of a socialized existence. In al-Zayyat’s ﬁrst home, the stairs leading to the roof are inhabited by a snake that will not succumb to the snake-charmers the family engages; the snake also serves as a socializing force, scaring the children away from the freedom of the roof. In her second home, though, the rooftop becomes attainable, if furtively, and the little room perched on top is a place available for childhood meditation. In this context, the author constructs a remarkable image: her seven-year-old self, sitting crouched on the ﬂoor against the wall in that little rooftop room. The object of her contemplation is a young poet, in his late twenties, who sits at a desk, lost in thought, oblivious to her presence, for when his meditation is disrupted, he is startled to ﬁnd her there.

Young Latifa al-Zayyat, future writer of a landmark work of ﬁction, gazes from the margins of the room to the man, the poet, at its center. Sitting above her, he is the sign of centrality, of ‘high’ literature, the scion of a longstanding tradition of poetic composition. The author refers to him as al-Sha‘ir al-Hamshari: this is Muhammad ‘Abd al-Mu‘ti al-Hamshari (1908–38). As a romantic poet in the thirties, this poet was also representative of ways in which social notions of the literary were being turned inside out, for the poetic art he practiced constituted a sharp break with the neoclassical poetry that had long held sway. But from the vantage point of young Latifa, he was the marker of literariness and of a kind of absolute value. True to the history of European romanticism, and like several other Arab romantic poets of the time, al-Hamshari would die young, as the adolescent al-Zayyat ﬁnds out, several years later, from her older brother.

Al-Zayyat situates this childhood incident in the rooftop room as a time of innocence, presaging her awakening realization of the presence of tragedy, unfairness, and evil in the world in which she lives—a shadow embodied in the poet’s early death. But she also situates it as a trope of connectedness and relation: her seven-year-old self contemplates the self-absorbed poet, in total silence, as a way of contemplating herself, a way of searching for a sense of completion, a groping for identity and meaning through loving connection with others. This image offers an entry point into al-Zayyat’s writing, and indeed into a history of women’s writing in modern Egypt. For the author gestures to the process of forming a female identity when she sketches the silent, admiring seven-year-old in her rooftop refuge, a little girl whom the reader knows will become a leader in the student movement of the 1940s, a committed lifelong activist in cultural–political struggle, a noted professor, and an innovative writer of ﬁction, autobiography, and criticism. This image, the little girl on the margins gazing at the man poet who holds his words inside, not making them available to her, is juxtaposed with that of the author’s mother as storyteller. Al-Zayyat recalls being simultaneously frightened and fascinated as her mother related to her the real-life tale of Rayya and Sakina, a pair of female serial killers in 1920s Alexandria whose story generated an outpouring of popular narratives at the time. Al-Zayyat stresses that it was the narrative itself, the realness of it, that attracted her, not its moral. Her mother’s narration is further contrasted with the products of mass culture, as al-Zayyat recalls seeing the movie version of Rayya and Sakina years later—and remaining unmoved.

While al-Zayyat makes no reference in any of this to her own writing career, she situates her own writing and a history of women writing through the implicit contrast between the poet on the rooftop and the storytelling mother to whom a frightened little girl comes for comfort in the night, between the romantic poet in quiet isolation and the popular narrative centering on female anti-heroes—between, ﬁnally, different languages and worlds. The image echoes against an autobiographical image of childhood evoked by the poet ‘A’isha Taymur (1840–1902) in the preface to a ﬁctional tale (al-Taimuriyya, 1990) written nearly forty years before al-Zayyat was born:

Says the one with the broken wing, Aisha Ismat daughter of Ismail Pasha Taimur: Ever since my cradle cushion was rolled up, and my foot roved the carpet of the world, ever since I became aware of where enticements and reason dwelt for me, and I grew conscious of the inviolable space around my father and grandfather—ever since that time, my ﬂedgling aim was to nurse eagerly on tales of the nations of old. I aged while still young trying to get to the root of the words of those who have gone before. I used to be infatuated with the evening chatter of the elderly women, wanting to listen to the choicest stories. . . .

When my mental faculties were prepared for learning, and my powers of understanding had reached a state of receptivity, there came to me the mistress of compassion and probity, the treasurehouse of knowledge and wonders that amaze—my mother, may God protect her with His grace and forgiveness. Bearing the instruments of embroidery and weaving, she began to work seriously on my education, striving to instill in me cleverness and comprehension. But I was incapable of learning, and I had no desire or readiness to become reﬁned in the occupations of women. I used to ﬂee from her as the prey escapes the net, rushing headlong into the assemblages of writers, with no sense of embarrassment.

Little ‘A’isha tries to ﬁnd a secluded spot in which to write, where the screeching of the pen (her favorite sound) will not draw a rebuke. If Taymur and al-Zayyat were generations apart, both had to struggle to make space, psychic and social, for their writing; and for both, the oral narratives of women family members were an early inspiration, and an image contrasting with that of the isolated writer in a tower (or in a rooftop room). The woman as storyteller, bringing together a community and shaping its history against an ofﬁcial, written history, would become a consistent motif in writings by women in Egypt. The ﬁrst short-story collection by a woman to be published in Egypt was Suhayr al-Qalamawi’s (b. 1911) collection Ahadith jaddati (My Grandmother’s Tales, Cairo, 1935). Al-Qalamawi bases the whole structure and narrative rhythm of this collection on the same traditional female social role that al-Zayyat portrays her mother as enacting and that Taymur constructs: that of preserver and renewer of community history through oral narrative, a trope that saturates the contemporary scene. As a grandmother reminisces about the good old days to her granddaughter, in the gentle generational conﬂict that emerges al-Qalamawi offers a social critique and an oblique vision of wartime from the perspective of those who stayed home. This was in line with most of the ﬁction appearing in Egypt in the 1930s, comprising critical realist depictions of middle-class Egyptian society and, through middle-class eyes, peasant society. Since the turn of the century, ﬁction had gradually become established as a respectable literary practice, indeed an indispensable one for a society in the throes of resistance to a colonial presence and reorientation toward an independent future. Fiction’s fortunes were enhanced by a lively non-ofﬁcial press, which welcomed short stories and serialized novels along with poetry and nonﬁction. Aspiring ﬁction writers got practice by translating and adapting European works of ﬁction, often loosely, for the press and for publishing houses. Most of these writers were men, and as ﬁction writing developed in sophistication and acceptance through the ﬁrst half of the century, it was the names of men that occupied central positions in an evolving canon of ﬁctional writing: Muhammad and Mahmud Taymur, Tahir Lashin, Yahya Haqqi, Yusuf Idris, Naguib Mahfouz, and others. But women had started to write and publish ﬁction around the same time. Mostly ignored by critics, they published in the growing number of women’s magazines that began to appear in the 1890s, and also in some mainstream magazines like al-Hilal. Labiba Hashim (1880–1947), a Lebanese immigrant to Egypt, published ‘story-essays’ in the early women’s press, including her own magazine, Fatat al-sharq (1906). These are
quasi-ﬁctional presentations of characters and situations interwoven with expository prose; the narrative ‘proves’ the point of the essay. Hashim published arabizations of European works and tried her hand at writing fully formed short stories, as well as producing polemics on women’s education and emancipation. Another immigrant from the Lebanon, Zaynab Fawwaz (c.1850–1914), published a play and an historical novel around the turn of the century while contributing essays and poetry to the press. In attempting this variety of literary practices, Hashim and Fawwaz were writers of their time.

While ﬁnding and creating outlets in the press, Hashim and other women published books. Between 1900 and 1925, thirty-one Arab women authors published at least sixty-two volumes in Arabic in Egypt. Of course, this is a tiny number compared to the publishing output of men, and most of these authors, with the exception of another Lebanese immigrant, Mayy Ziyada (1886–1941), never achieved canonical status. As time went on, women tended to concentrate on short-story writing while men turned to the novel, as Hilary Kilpatrick (1985) has noted. Perhaps this was partly because short-story writing could more easily be ﬁtted in with women’s other duties—a factor that women writing today in Egypt have indicated as signiﬁcant to their own careers. But this concentration on the short story may have also had an impact on the status of these women as writers, or perhaps it is the other way around: for the novel was seen as the more worthy genre, both in terms of the literary skill it required and in terms of the comprehensive social vision it could offer.

So when al-Qalamawi published My Grandmother’s Tales, at least two generations of publishing women had preceded her. But, again with the exception of the essayist and prose poet Mayy Ziyada, the visibility of the women who had published had been very restricted, limited by the relative marginality of the outlets in which they published; by the inability, dictated by social practice, to maintain any kind of public intellectual presence; and by a general lack of critical attention. By the 1930s, as notions about women’s status in society were slowly shifting—in tandem and sometimes in tension with nationalist ideologies and programs—women could participate more visibly in cultural production. Al-Qalamawi’s work came at a time when textual and social visibility, fought for by early feminists and pro-feminist nationalists, was becoming more possible. She used this new space, paradoxically, to articulate the private world of upper- and middle-class women at the turn of the century. This strategy offered a social critique that differed from that of contemporary men writers. It was a critique founded in what some critics have seen as characteristic of women’s writing, a ‘dailiness’ that captures the everyday, supposedly trivial but in fact fundamental events that shape us. This characteristic, and an emotionalism that is seen to accompany it, have often been used to dismiss writing by women and to deny it a place in the canon, on the basis that this writing deals with what is ‘unimportant.’ Al-Qalamawi’s book in fact had the beneﬁt of an introduction by the noted litterateur Taha Husayn (1889–1973), who was her professor as she worked toward the ﬁrst MA to be earned by a woman in an Egyptian university. Even as Husayn praises the work, the nature of his praise has the effect of relegating the work to a certain sphere. He delights in what he calls the work’s “sweet ingenuousness,” which begins, he says, “with the ﬁrst sentence.” ‘Feminine’ and ‘naive’ are equated.

Feminist critics the world over have been reevaluating and valorizing these very characteristics—triviality, simplicity, primacy of emotion, dailiness—as Miriam Cooke (1988) has done with regard to Lebanese women writers of the Lebanese civil war period. Al-Qalamawi’s short stories, never accepted by critics as a central work of Arabic literature, in fact constituted a new and important, experimental, addition to the literature of realist social critique in Egypt.

Two decades later, as more and more women and men were publishing ﬁction, Latifa al-Zayyat began work on The Open Door. It was a moment when writers who had become part of the canon of modern Arabic literature, like Naguib Mahfouz and Yusuf Idris, were bringing what is usually labeled an Arabic realist tradition of social critique to its height, to a point where in the case of Mahfouz, for example, this approach had been so fully explored that he would feel the need to turn in new directions. Sakina Fu’ad, Asma’ Halim, Sophie Abdullah, and others were working within this fold to explore the constraints and possibilities speciﬁc to women’s lives in Egypt at mid-century. Al-Zayyat’s novel, which on the surface of it seems to participate fully and unequivocally in a realist approach to social critique, pointed to some of the ways in which the Arabic novel would develop away from that approach. The Open Door did so by privileging and interweaving two kinds of marginality, one social and one literary: the ﬁrst, putting a female perspective at the center, within a context of family and community; the second, using everyday rather than literary diction. Many other Egyptian writers had been experimenting with the use of an Egyptian colloquial Arabic in writing dialogue; for some time, the vernacular’s status as a literary language had been an issue among the intelligentsia. Yet al-Zayyat’s use of it may have contributed to the fact that The Open Door was denied recognition as a major achievement in Arabic literature in a formal and graphic sense noted below.

Born in 1923 in the Delta town of Dimyat, Latifa al-Zayyat was a generation older than her protagonist, Layla. Layla witnesses and participates in the 1946 demonstrations as a middle-school student; her creator was one of the university student leaders at that time, active in the National Committee of Workers and Students, elected its secretary. Al-Zayyat earned her doctorate in 1957 and went on to become a revered and inspiring professor of English literary criticism at ‘Ayn Shams University in Cairo. She also served as Director of the Arts Academy in the early 1970s. She was president of the Committee to Defend National Culture, which she helped to found in 1979 with other intellectuals concerned about the impact of the Camp David accords on Egyptian society and culture. She was active in many cultural organizations and women’s organizations, and wrote magazine columns on gender issues for the popular magazine Hawwa’. She published many books and articles on literary criticism; although she was silent as a ﬁction writer for many years after The Open Door appeared, she resumed her activity in that sphere and published a short-story collection in 1986, al-Shaykhukha wa-qisas ukhra: majmu‘a qisasiya (Old Age and Other Stories: A Short Story Collection), followed by two novels and a play (al-Rajul alladhi ‘arafa tuhmatahu: riwaya qasira [The Man Aware of his Accusation: A Novella], published in the journal Adab wa-naqd in 1991 and as a book in 1995; Sahib al-bayt: riwaya [Owner of the House: A Novel], 1994; Bay‘ wa-shira’: masrahiya [Purchase and Sale: A Play], 1994). She published her acclaimed, innovative autobiographical work in 1992. She was awarded the State Prize for Literature in 1996.

In her life and commitment, al-Zayyat was at the center of her country’s struggle. And to appreciate this novel’s intertwining of the public and the personal, one must have an understanding of the political events that surround and infuse it. The novel opens with the dramatic and violently-met mass demonstrations of February 21, 1946.

Egypt was still reeling economically from World War II, in which German and British (and British colonial) soldiers had marched and fought on Egyptian soil; British and Australian soldiers investigating Cairo’s pleasures had not endeared themselves to the populace. There was strong resentment of Britain’s continued hold over Egypt; having announced a nominal independence in 1923, after some forty years of occupation, London retained for itself the right to dictate ﬁnancial organization, to station troops and control Egypt’s military, and to control the Suez Canal. Negotiations for a true independence had resulted in the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty, hardly an improvement. Power was deadlocked among the Palace, where the scion of the Turkish dynasty founded early in the nineteenth century by Muhammad Ali held sway; the British Ambassador; and the Egyptian Parliament, where the two major parties locked horns. The Wafd (or Delegation), formed after World War I to demand self-determination from the Great Powers, had evolved into a popular mass party, yet had generated as much cynicism as had the Liberal Constitutionalists, the bastion of a landholding elite, for popular perception was quick to notice indications that holding onto power seemed more important to many of its leaders than did the country’s needs—a perception that emerges in this novel through conversations among the residents of no. 3 Ya‘qub Street. During the war, Great Britain’s local representatives had not hesitated to make it clear where true power lay; thus, the ﬁery students at Cairo University—and elsewhere—held few illusions. Student activism was nothing new for Egypt’s young intelligentsia, as Ahmed Abdalla shows in his history of student activism in Egypt. As the 1930s wore on, both rightist organizations and leftist groupings, including communists, drew support from students, and communist student leaders—female and male—were important in the demonstrations of the 1940s. (Cairo Faculty of Medicine, where Layla’s brother Mahmud and her cousin ‘Isam are enrolled, was one of the centers of activism.) As the novel sketches, this was a generation for which new ideas about social organization and personal freedom were inseparable from political demands—even if, as al-Zayyat trenchantly shows, the young often had difﬁculty squaring theory and practice. And such ideas, and the activism, trickled down from the universities to Cairo’s secondary schools; Khedive Isma‘il School, a site in the novel, was known as a center of student activism (Abdalla, 55), and the authorities worried about pre-university students on the rampage. These young and enthusiastic forces swelled the numbers of popular demonstrations into the impressive thousands. Early in 1946 public anger seemed on the upswing, and in the second week of February thousands of students held a meeting at which they called for abrogation of the 1936 Treaty and a stop to continued negotiations. They called for a general strike, and the date set was February 21. On that day—as Chapter One describes—when four armored British cars rolled past the British Qasr al-Nil barracks and plowed into the Isma‘iliya (now Liberation) Square demonstrations in downtown Cairo, the throngs answered by bodily attacking the armored cars and setting them on ﬁre.

Isma‘il Sidqi, remembered as the repressive prime minister of the 1930s (1930–33), had been summoned back into power just before this mass show of public protest; it is his measures that the patriarch at no. 3 Ya‘qub Street in the old, middle-class neighborhood of Sayyida Zaynab (named for one of Cairo’s major shrines, to the Prophet Muhammad’s granddaughter) fears. Sidqi Pasha resumed negotiations with the British, as he had leaders of popular protest arrested and proved himself—once again—no friend to industrial workers and their attempts to organize. This unpopular prime minister represented for many the reactionary stranglehold of the old aristocracy; it seems no accident that al-Zayyat names her young, upper-class male anti-hero ‘Sidqi.’

Sidqi’s negotiations, like those of past decades, failed; one major reason was Britain’s reluctance to let go of a strategic presence in Egypt. Though British troops withdrew from Cairo and the Delta, they remained in the Canal Zone, and hence that region took on symbolic as well as practical importance in the resistance to neo-colonialism. In 1951, after Sidqi’s successor did abrogate the 1936 treaty, volunteer commandos and British troops skirmished in the Zone. In Cairo—as we see in the novel—the university becomes a recruiting ground and a training camp where, according to Abdalla, 10,000 students were trained in military maneuvers, and student battalions began to leave for the Canal Zone in November. There, they joined others—industrial workers, the union of Suez Canal workers, military ofﬁcers, peasants—and al-Zayyat’s portrayal of this resistance as badly provisioned and lacking support from the government is historically accurate. Yet the resistance incurred British response. In January, 1952, the British attacked an Egyptian police barracks at Isma‘iliya (on the Canal), believing that Egyptian police were taking part in the resistance there. Cairo erupted as the news came that ﬁfty Egyptians had died. As policemen and ﬁremen looked on in passive solidarity, crowds set ﬁre to institutions and neighborhoods afﬁliated with the British presence in what became known as the Cairo Fire and Black Saturday (January 26, 1952). The ﬁre also consumed commercial establishments—like Cicurel, the exclusive department store where Layla’s cousin Gamila shops for her trousseau—associated with Europeans or those perceived as Europeanized locals (les Grands Magasins Cicurel et Oreco was owned by a prominent Cairo family of Jewish Egyptians, and twice rebuilt by the Egyptian government). This event and the ensuing declaration of martial law and harsh repression of all popular resistance stripped the monarchy of any remaining moral authority, and may have hastened the July Revolution of that year, in which the Free Ofﬁcers assumed power. King Faruq was made to abdicate and to sail from Alexandria three days after the coup, as the populace—and al-Zayyat’s ﬁctional personae—celebrated.

But the end of the ancien régime did not mean the end of the British presence. More negotiations resulted in a 1954 agreement stipulating the withdrawal within twenty months of British forces from their base at the Suez Canal, and indeed they were gone in April of 1956. But then a new drama began. Maneuvering between the imperative of acquiring massive aid for arms and for development on the one hand, and the imperative of maintaining independence from Western ﬁnancial and political institutions on the other, ‘Abd al-Nasser was deciding whether to accept the conditions for a British- and US-ﬁnanced project to build the Aswan High Dam when the US pulled out. In “a dramatic act of deﬁance,” as William Cleveland puts it, ‘Abd al-Nasser announced the nationalization of the Suez Canal, explaining that its revenues would go to projects that Western governments were unwilling to ﬁnance. Non-aligned governments and populations applauded the move as a signal of independence from the Great Powers, who were not at all pleased by ‘Abd al-Nasser’s move. As negotiations were mounted to ﬁnd a way out, a secret agreement among Britain, France, and Israel, who all had their own reasons to oppose ‘Abd al-Nasser, resulted in an Israeli strike into Sinai on October 29, 1956, followed by a wave of British bombing two days later, and then by British and French paratroop landings in Port Said (November 5) and an advance on Suez City—events that bring The Open Door to a close. The next day, a United Nations ceaseﬁre marked the end of that advance, as US troops moved in and the British and French—and eventually the Israelis—withdrew. Although this was not a military victory for Egypt, it was a political victory for ‘Abd al-Nasser and a deﬁning moment for the nation.

The Open Door chronicles the political and sexual coming-to-awareness of a middle-class girl in the Egyptian provinces. Al-Zayyat has called it an attempt to capture her own vision of the world as she was growing into adulthood. The main character, Layla, is ten years younger than al-Zayyat would have been as the political events that mark the story unfold. Layla’s growth is paralleled by that of the broad-based nationalist resistance to continued British control over the reins of government through the thirties and forties, despite Egypt’s nominal 1923 independence. As Hiba Sharif has noted in an essay on this novel, every advance or retreat in the political realm is matched by one in Layla’s personal realm and vice versa—one realm does not precede the other (though, as Hilary Kilpatrick (1992) has noted astutely, some key political events of the time—the war of 1948—are ignored, perhaps because they do not ﬁt into the scheme of Layla’s own development). Through the structure of her novel, al-Zayyat suggests an intimate and inseparable relation between personal liberation and the political freedom of self-determination. Sketching the lives of middle-class girls in intimate detail, some of which might sound foreign to an Egyptian teenager now (banana sandwiches and forbidden dancing at school; the old kerosene burners that preceded butagaz), she draws on historical references to ﬁll out that struggle. It seems no accident that Layla’s college-student cousin ‘Isam ﬁnds her reading Salama Musa (1887–1958) and arguing for his polemics. Not only does this suggest Layla’s precocious intelligence, which her parents would rather ignore, but Musa as cultural symbol signals both a national/ist identity transcending Coptic and Muslim identities and a sympathy for leftist allegiances. Musa was a Copt and a Fabian socialist for whom national allegiance and the issue of independence became paramount. Like many of his contemporaries in the 1920s–30s, he believed in the possibility of adapting Western institutions while retaining local cultural and political autonomy. He was an outspoken proponent of women’s rights and a ﬁrm supporter of Egypt’s early feminist movement. He authored a celebrated autobiography and was an inﬂuential magazine editor. Layla’s choice of reading matter tells us where her sympathies lie.

But it is another aspect of the novel that I want to emphasize here. In a recent autobiographical essay, al-Zayyat herself says she thinks the novel was a new presence on the literary scene in its emphasis on the construction of dramatic moments, at a time when most novels contained a large amount of external description of scenes, characters, and events. Very much a work of its time in interrogating an ideology of middle-class life, The Open Door diverged in its method of interrogation. The novel is striking for its long passages of dialogue largely unmediated by description. And much of the dialogue seemingly does not contribute to the onward march of the narrative—just one example being an exchange among Layla, her cousin, and her aunt about which cloth to use for an engagement dress and which for the wedding dress. In fact, though, such immediate dramatic moments subtly echo and call to mind the dramas of public life, as they also speak to the importance in consciousness formation of little moments. The novel is woven through the daily conversations of its characters, the ‘small’ as well as the ‘large’ events of mundane existence. Characters have distinctive voices, even in some cases distinctive colloquial idioms, as they would in real life. More often than not, these conversations take place among women without any men around, or with one man, always a family member, present. Like al-Qalamawi’s My Grandmother’s Tales, they successfully place the focus on women’s worlds, and on female perspectives. Many men and fewer women had already given ﬁctional treatment to the question of women’s status in society, of women’s education, marriage practices, and so forth, criticizing received practices and calling for change. But they did so from what might be called an externalized point of view, even when a female character was central to the action.

But as I have noted, there is a further aspect to the primacy of dialogue in The Open Door. Al-Zayyat unabashedly uses a colloquial register—in this case, the spoken Arabic of the urbanized middle classes—in her dialogue. She was not alone in this; the use of colloquial Arabic in ﬁction, drama, and poetry had been a hot issue among writers since the turn of the century, although the context and direction of the debate differed for each genre. In ﬁction, some writers had supported the use of the colloquial on the basis that a colloquial register best suited the requirements of a literature of realistic depiction. For others, using the colloquial expressed a political stance, a signal of the author’s populist alignment. But there was ﬁerce opposition to the use of colloquial Arabic in literary expression; many writers saw it as a debased or corrupted tongue, to which they contrasted a supposedly ‘pure’ classical idiom. Political and religious considerations were important: use of the colloquial was variously seen as destructive of an ideal of Arab unity; as culturally divisive; as insulting to the language of the Qur’an. Naguib Mahfouz, for example, has steadfastly opposed its use, although even he lets colloquial usages creep in now and then.

When al-Zayyat was writing The Open Door in the late 1950s, the ﬁrst wave of experimentation with colloquial dialogue, in the 1920s and 1930s, had subsided somewhat. And in well-known novels and short stories of that period, for instance Ibrahim ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Mazini’s (1890–1949) Ibrahim al-katib and short stories by the Taymur brothers, use of the colloquial is guarded and uneven. As early as Muhammad Haykal’s Zaynab (1913; often heralded as the ﬁrst true Arabic novel although it was preceded by several decades of novel writing in Arabic), when peasant or proletarian characters speak or are spoken to, the speech may be couched in a colloquial register. But the educated characters tend to speak in a register of formal speech among or within themselves, especially when articulating what the author sees as a profound thought or a timeless truth.

In the 1950s, al-Zayyat had before her the example of the socialist writer ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Sharqawi (1920–87), author of the much-acclaimed novel al-Ard (The Land, ﬁrst published serially in 1953), which attempted a representation of peasant resistance to authoritarian regimes of the pre-1952 period. Al-Sharqawi’s use of the colloquial, more sustained than that of previous writers, revolved around his portrayal of peasant society. As Hilary Kilpatrick (1992) has said, “the feel for the violent, aggressive way of speaking characteristic of the peasants is perhaps the single most important factor contributing to the illusion of realism in [The Land].”

Al-Zayyat—like al-Sharqawi, a member of the leftist intelligentsia of this period—employs the colloquial differently, grounding in it a portrayal not of peasants or proletarians—those ‘others’—but of a petit bourgeois intelligentsia and the remnants of a Turkish aristocracy, her own social group. Furthermore, she uses colloquial not only in the dialogue but also for internal monologue and indirect free discourse, thus going further than even al-Sharqawi. And this dominance of the colloquial enhances al-Zayyat’s portrayal of the mundane, of the everyday as a political arena, more speciﬁcally of the interrelationships between the gendering of expectations and behavior on the one hand, and the politics of national liberation on the other. It seems to me that this deployment of language can be seen as a feminist act, as basic to al-Zayyat’s production of what is unquestionably a feminist text in its assumptions, its authorial stance, as well as in its subject matter. In its very structure and language, the novel questions the culture’s consignment to the margins of, ﬁrst, female experience and articulation; second, the mundane as literary subject; and third, the language that is the medium of everyday experience. And her colloquial is lively, precise, female: characters emerge in their choice of expression. Layla’s mother betrays her allegiance to received behavior patterns through her choice of expressions and proverbs, which her children mimic satirically, and which contrast utterly with the dry, self-satisﬁed stiltedness of Dr. Ramzi. Gamila and her mother betray their aspirations as they hover between the French loanwords that label coveted things and their own social and linguistic antecedents; that wealth is not matched by social ﬁnesse in Gamila’s ﬁancé is hilariously evident in his language. Al-Zayyat draws close to colloquial poets of the time and earlier as she beautifully and precisely catches not only the phrases but the pronunciation of different social groups. And, to my knowledge, no writer in Arabic before or since has captured middle-class adolescent girlhood so precisely through its own rhythms as al-Zayyat does here, dramatizing the story’s conﬂicts in the three-way conversations among ‘Adila, Layla, and Sanaa. The power of the vernacular in al-Zayyat’s hands is a strength of the work that the translator can only imperfectly convey. And part of this power has to do with the naming practices of everyday life and language. When al-Zayyat refers to Layla’s mother and aunt as Umm Layla and Umm Gamila (‘Mother of Layla,’ ‘Mother of Gamila’) rather than as Saniya and Samira, is she deploying description to remind us of how Layla is enmeshed in family, a closely woven net of relationships that she must navigate as she struggles to name her own experience? At the time, in this conservative middle-class environment as well as among working-class and peasant families, parents were often named after their children, and known to acquaintances as ‘Father of . . . ’ or ‘Mother of . . . .’ Furthermore, in a society where the expected label would be to call these women after their sons (thus, Umm Mahmud and Umm ‘Isam), is al-Zayyat deliberately replacing this practice with a female genealogy?

The Open Door was nominated for a state prize, a nomination upheld by a unanimous vote of the state-appointed committee, according to al-Zayyat. But the writer and literary arbiter ‘Abbas al-‘Aqqad (1889–1964), in his capacity as a permanent member of the Higher Council on the Arts and Letters, threatened to resign unless the prize were rescinded. And the prize was withdrawn, on the basis that al-Zayyat had been “immoderate in [her] use of the colloquial.” Perhaps this was an indication of how new al-Zayyat’s use of language in The Open Door was on the Egyptian literary scene, a novelty she herself has commented on.

Since the days of The Open Door, the literary scene has shifted, and opened up. The past thirty years have been a period of great experimentation in every genre, of large strides in critical work, of an enormous expansion in governmental and non-governmental literary publishing, of the founding of important literary journals. Of course, within that period there have been times of relative literary quiescence, such as the time just after the 1967 war, a time of deep political–personal crisis for the intelligentsia that left many writers silent for years. Writers have also had to contend with a great deal of formal and informal censorship, to this day. Repression and political crisis have not stopped them, of course. The self-examination sparked by 1967, for example, helped to fertilize a tremendous creative ferment in the 1970s, in poetry, ﬁction, and drama alike. In ﬁction, writers had by and large left the fold of social realism in favor of a literary expression that focused more on inner formulations of identity and the fragmentary, self-contradictory subjectivity of characters, expressed through a more impressionistic and fragmented kind of narrative. Some experimented with forms, images, and themes drawn from ‘the heritage’—medieval Islamic, pharaonic, Coptic, folkloric. Some tried their hands at new kinds of historical ﬁction, crafting styles that echoed and subverted those of the chroniclers of medieval Arab societies. Some took on the voice of the traditional storyteller or ballad singer. In fact, the prominent novelist and critic Edwar al-Kharrat has linked modernist and postmodernist Arabic literature to “a whole legacy of Arab culture,” challenging the prevailing academic tendency of past decades (among both Arab and Euro/American academics) to deﬁne and periodicize the history of modern Arabic ﬁction according to categories of Euro/American experience.

Searching for their own literary voices, women and men writers of the 1970s and 1980s shaped the language in new ways. For one thing, no longer was the division between linguistic registers—‘classical’ or ‘modern standard’ Arabic versus the colloquial—conceived as impermeable. The notion of what might be considered canonical opened up. Among other things, this meant a reevaluation of many works by women that had been previously dismissed or ignored—similar to the reevaluation by feminist critics that has gone on in the realms of European and North American literatures. In particular, contemporary women writers began to regard themselves consciously as part of an historically continuing tradition of women writers. Women writers in Egypt, along with many men writers, are concerned with deconstructing rather than abandoning the dominant tradition. Women writers have certainly demonstrated an active, probing, subversive relationship to that tradition, questioning the privileging of any one position as the position of truth by, for example, rewriting established works from a differently gendered perspective.

If al-Zayyat’s articulation of marginality, in both The Open Door and Operation Search, is not primarily one of class (marginalization through class position, as well as gender, is represented by a secondary character, Sayyida, the servant who is exploited sexually by Layla’s ﬁrst love), the double marginalization of class and gender, with its multiplier effects, is there. Al-Zayyat produced for her time a counterhegemonic discourse, one that tries to make possible a new way of seeing things, a new way of acting, by taking the margins of social existence and articulation as centers. Thus, we return to the image of the seven-year-old girl, crouched on the ﬂoor, silent, gazing at the man poet, the representative of all that is literary. But the seven-year-old next to the wall would ﬁnd a voice; she would question the center, literarily and politically; she would mount her own search campaign in further novels, an autobiographical text, and in drama. The seven-year-old on the roof would participate in opening out the horizons of Arabic literary practice.

As Hala Badri suggested in the comment quoted above, what was startling and bold when The Open Door—novel and movie—emerged may be obvious now, for the transformations in girls’ and women’s lives that al-Zayyat and others struggled to institute then have become part of contemporary history. And the intensely melodramatic quality of the text may temper its power for readers of the new millennium. Yet we should not dismiss this novel. It was an historically important event; it remains a timely literary work. For in an environment of increasing conservatism, in a global situation where women’s rights to choose their own futures become touchstones for issues of all sorts, those transformations begin to look tenuous, and the social and political struggles that al-Zayyat and other independent-minded, courageous writers have made part of their ﬁctional worlds are indeed not entirely a thing of the past.

I am indebted to the following sources, which also offer further background to the interested reader:

Ahmed Abdalla, The Student Movement and National Politics in Egypt 1923-1973 (London: Al Saqi Books, 1985).

Sayyid al-Bahrawi, ed., Latifa al-Zayyat: al-adab wa’l-watan (Cairo: Nur: Dar al-Mar’a al-Arabiya, Markaz al-Buhuth al-Arabiya, 1996).

Joel Beinin and Zachary Lockman, Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Communism, Islam, and the Egyptian Working Class, 1882–1954 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987).

Jacques Berque, Egypt: Imperialism and Revolution, trans. Jean Stewart (New York and Washington: Praeger, 1972).

Marilyn Booth, “Introduction,” in Marilyn Booth, ed. and trans., My Grandmother’s Cactus: Stories by Egyptian Women (London: Quartet Books, 1991).

———, “Latifa al-Zayyat,” Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature, ed. J. S. Meisami and Paul Starkey (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 2: 825.

William L. Cleveland, A History of the Modern Middle East (Boulder, San Francisco, and Oxford: Westview Press, 1994).

Miriam Cooke, War’s Other Voices: Women Writers on the Lebanese Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (Cambridge: Belknap, 1991).

Hilary Kilpatrick, “Women and Literature in the Arab World: The Arab East,” in Mineke Schipper, ed., Unheard Words: Women and Literature in Africa, the Arab World, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America, trans. by Barbara P. Fasting (London: Allison and Busby, 1985).

———, “The Egyptian Novel from Zaynab to 1980,” in M. M. Badawi, ed., Modern Arabic Literature [Cambridge History of Arabic Literature vol. 4] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

Hiba Sharif, “al-Bab al-maftuh,”Hagar: Kitab al-Mar’a 1 (1993): 134–43.

Aisha Ismat al-Taimuriyya, “Introduction to the Results of Circumstances in Words and Deeds,” trans. Marilyn Booth, in Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke, eds., Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990).

Latifa al-Zayyat, Hamlat taftish: awraq shakhsiya (Cairo: Kitab al-Hilal, 1992).