Rebellious -- and proud of it A few months ago, on my way out of the Cairo Opera House to a downtown baladi café where, with the musician friends who were keeping my company, I planned on playing and singing, my grandmother unexpectedly phoned. To keep her happy -- in my foolishness -- I lied and said I was on my way home. To which -- a minor shock, this -- she laughed: "What a terrible way to spend an evening in Cairo. Why, do you know what my friends and I used to do there? Well, we would walk downtown, find any old baladi café, settle down there and play songs till dawn..." So I bit my lip: too late to tell the truth. Yet the thought, which lingers, warmed my heart: here I am where she was, in the city she would describe to me in my childhood, again and again, as the most beautiful on earth. And the episode taught me something, too: to flaunt my being unconventional, for it is cause for celebration. Most of us are too young to remember my grandmother's music. It's been a very long time since Siham Rifqi -- born Fatima Qassab -- started performing. Lebanon was yet to become independent of French colonial rule; Palestine was still Palestine, albeit under British rule. The key events in the 20th century Arab history had not yet happened. And Siham would live through them all. It is her experience of times, places and people that merits commemoration, though it probably makes the most sense to start at the end. Shortly before the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, led by General Ariel Sharon, she and her children were already outside Beirut, having moved to Europe for what they believed would be a short period. But civil conflicts and foreign attacks would continue to plague Lebanon for years to come. And like many Lebanese expatriates, she has not returned. Unlike many, though, she never quite adapted to her new surroundings; perhaps she carries too many memories -- memories she keeps recounting, again and again, to her grandchildren, of whom I happen to be the eldest... She wears them on her face, too: in the presence of guests, age notwithstanding, she still looks her best. A diva who was once known all across the Arab world can only look beautiful at all times. And a self-aware diva she remained, too, while we conducted this interview. No matter that the interviewer is her granddaughter and friend: she was eminently professional. And -- this was perhaps the most beautiful aspect of the whole experience -- she keeps secrets still. "My dear, it really is very simple," Siham says over the phone, from Madrid. "I started singing when I was 13, in 1942, in my home town of Tripoli, north Lebanon." One of her friends was the daughter of a musician, Mahmoud Hmaisi, who had a music school there: he urged her to attend because he thought her voice was "unbelievable", and there she met artist and theatre company director Rifqi Al-Afyouni -- soon to be her fiancé, then husband. He was 38 at the time. The family was against it all, of course: the singing, professional entanglements at such an early age. And so Siham eloped with Al-Afyouni. In Homs, Syria, his uncle (who also just happened to be Tripoli's religious magistrate) altered her date of birth from 1929 to 1921, thus giving her legal cover not only to marry a man so much older but to go on stage. He also published their names on the marriage lists of the week, and it was in this way that her mother found out. A song called Rouh Allah Lay Samhak (Go, may God not forgive you) launched her career in Damascus. Still, the couple was plagued with financial difficulty. "At one point we had no money at all and stayed in a farmer's room -- he was kind enough to donate it." There is laughter in her voice. "Nor was there money for food -- for three days we shared lettuce with the farmer's donkey." Aleppo proved more propitious. Her first performance there, featuring a song that made fun of the French and British empires, "drove the audience crazy: everyone loved our work". Word got round and suddenly she was living and working in Iraq; she was to stay for 18 months. King Faisal, a British dummy, was only three years old at the time; and the situation was interesting, she says, "because people were very watchful of the government". To distract them, the authorities lifted a brief ban on cafés and cabarets ---- "it worked". Nightlife flourished, to the benefit of Siham, perhaps, but the comment rang true of the present -- entertainment as a mechanism of oppression is an age-old Arab recipe, it seems. A series of spectacular brushes with death followed Siham's stint in Iraq. In 1945, she recalls, Egyptians made jokes about the establishment of the Arab League. But a year later, while in Jerusalem practising her new songs at the YMCA Hotel, she decided to have her hair done at the King David Hotel salon; to which the qanoun player, a devout Sufi, responded peculiarly: stay where you are, he urged her; it is not safe to go. And in the ensuing argument, an explosion was heard. He had saved her from the hotel bombing, which killed some 91 people, many of them British -- an act perpetrated by the Jewish terrorist group Hagannah, on the instigation of Menachem Begin (the Israeli prime minister from 1977 to 1983), then in charge of the Irgun -- one of the key moments, as it would come to be seen, in the build-up to the establishment of Israel in 1948: "They never found my hairdresser..." Within days of the bombing, a plane she was planning on taking to Cairo crashed in the desert. "I had paid �20 to be on that flight, but the director of the Palestinian national radio offered me �3,000 to stay on and record 10 songs. The plane never made it to Cairo, and most of those on board were killed. Except, that is," she adds with sardonic humour, "for the pilot, who went on to become the first head of the newly founded EgyptAir." Speaking of her experience of pre- Nakba Palestine, Siham once told me about a little boy who was selling chewing gum on the street. Approaching, she asked him whether he was poor: "He told me he wasn't. Rather, his father had told him that if the Jewish people were going to make it in Palestine, they all needed to work, even children. I gave him some money, at the time I could only feel sorry for him. And this is how the Jews succeeded where we failed, as Arabs. We were too proud to work so hard, and unless we were poor we never would. Now the Arab world is full of children on the street, not to demonstrate a work ethic, but because of their poverty. Ah, God help the Arabs." When she returned to Cairo, just before Palestine was blocked off to her for the rest of her life, she sang on various occasions at the now burnt-down Cairo Opera House (in Attaba Square), starring in three films. One, Ahmed Galal's Aawdet Al-Ghayeb (Return of the Absent), featured star and producer Marie Queenie. This time round, Siham spent four years in Cairo -- the greatest, and most memorable, in her entire career. She returned to Beirut at age 20. There she sang of Palestine, and there she met Salaheddin Al- Assir, her second husband. Her separation from Al-Afyouni was not too difficult: he had taken to gambling away her earnings; she had borne him no children. The divorce came through smoothly enough. It was during this -- second -- phase of her life that, her connection with music floundering, she came to be part of Arab political circles. This happened through her husband, a committed poet and journalist who contributed to, among other publications, Al-Akhbar newspaper, and with whom she had three children. He was close to a Lebanese political elite striving to achieve equity in Lebanon. Six years after the July Revolution, by the time Cairo and Damascus merged into the United Arab Republic, the mood among Muslim and left-wing circles was pro-Gamal Abdel-Nasser and pro- Arab unity; the pan-Arab sentiment would persist long after Abdel-Nasser's death in 1970, in fact. "His death was a disaster," Siham says even now, very much in the vein of pan- Arabists. At the time, "my husband didn't want me to go on stage any more, but I continued to sing on the Egyptian radio". And when she did perform, in 1956, it was on a stage set up at Tel Al-Kebir prison, along with Farid Al-Atrash, Taheya Kariokka and Abdel- Ghani El-Sayed, to celebrate Israel's release of Arab hostages captured in the course of the Tripartite invasion, carried out in retaliation over Abdel-Nasser's nationalisation of the Suez Canal. "I recited some of my husband's poetry and sang my most famous song, Ya Um Al-Abaya (Oh, You who wears the abaya). The idea was to cheer up the soldiers who had just come back from Israeli torture camps." The song had first become popular in 1943, in Jordan to start with, where Siham had to sing it 17 times on one night, then in Haifa, where a crowd of Jordanians followed her to listen. At the start of her career, frequent curfews were declared in order to safeguard the arrival of Jewish newcomers from the Mediterranean to Palestine. By now, however, Haifa was blocked. The song had, in a sense, crossed borders inaccessible to human beings; it had achieved what the Arab states failed at. And her contribution notwithstanding, Siham speaks of the future of Arabs in laden tones: "I hope the Arabs can one day find a common voice to solve their problems. I can only pray for that to happen now." Poor health prevents her from travelling long distances, but I hope to bring her to Cairo one day. She swears she knows the city better than I could ever hope to know it. It was her stories, after all, that brought Cairo to life in my mind, long before I ever set foot in it. Anyway, I'm here now... By Serene Assir
