A voice of her own

Amina Elbendary listens to women retelling traditional folk tales in their own voices
The word is mine.. the decision is mine, and the final say is mine, my dears. I created my own words, I arranged them, and when I felt like it, I spoke...
My mother dressed me like a boy, and introduced me to people as the toughest young man in town; though in fact I am as soft and tender as a basil-leaf. My mother did what she did out of care and fear. She wanted to protect me from leading a life like hers; a life of fear, invisibility, deprivation. But she should have known that fear can never bring good. She deprived me of my gender the way she had been deprived of security and care. She hid me in the world of men for me to survive. But she never thought about my life: how could I live with myself, in constant fear. Death is better for me than living an invisible life.
You haven't guessed yet who I am? It isn't your fault. Those who live without seeking the truth are the ones to blame.
(From The One in Invisible Dress by Nesma Idris, translated by Hala Kamal)
This might sound like a story from Alf Layla wa Layla. It is not. It is the untold story of Scheherazade's third child, a daughter she disguised as a son; a story told only recently as a group of Egyptian women try to reclaim an oral heritage.
For centuries -- perhaps even millennia -- women have been telling and retelling stories, within the security of their homes, amongst themselves and to their children. Many of these stories remained unrecorded and unwritten, passed down from one generation to another.
As part of the entertainment of any society, folk tales (and children's stories) are part and parcel of the cultural construct. They reflect dominant ideas and ideals even as they simultaneously reinforce and perpetuate them. And as story telling gave way to contemporary genres of entertainment, especially within the visual media, many of the ideals and motifs prevalent in folk tales have been reproduced in new fashions. But, alas, not all that is old is good and some heritage is unduly sacrosanct, and many who listen and read between the lines are uncomfortable with the ideals -- especially gender roles -- promoted by this inheritance. Folk tales are only one medium through which these are expressed. And the patriarchal bias so engrained in these have worried many.
The Women and Memory Forum (WMF) was founded in 1996 by a group of Egyptian feminists, mostly academics, in order to reread Arab culture and history from a gender- sensitive perspective and address those blatant biases inherent in our cultural tradition. As Hala Kamal explains, the group is concerned with the long tradition of marginalisation that women have been subjected to and which has rendered them almost invisible in history.
Ultimately, and like other committed activists, they aim to shake the status quo. No easy feat that. They attempt to deconstruct those established paradigms by subverting the very constructs that uphold them. As part of studying popular cultural discourse using gender as a tool of analysis, the group formed a fairy tale workshop. They began by deconstructing these stories and motifs, and then attempted to rewrite many of them, eventually producing tales of their own. At the core of the group are several academics deeply rooted in feminist theory, including Hoda El-Sadda, Omayma Abu Bakr, Hala Kamal, Mounira Soliman and Mona Ibrahim. They've also attracted a number of young women interested in experimentation, "women" -- like Amani Abu Zeid, Seham Abdel-Salam and Nesma Idris -- "who believe in the power of the word," as Hala Kamal puts it.
Most of these women, mothers and aunts themselves, have been frustrated at the lack of adequate (read politically correct, gender-sensitive) stories to tell their little ones. Children's stories of both Arab and Western traditions are replete with inherent biases and negative images. Girls are praised for their beauty, boys for courage and strength. Girls are always dependent on the more assertive males to save them. So the group began making up their own stories.
The earliest output of the workshop had a rudimentary approach, a sort of in-your-face simplistic feminism, like the story quoted here of The One in Invisible Dress where Nesma Idris explicitly says "The day my mother introduced me to my father as one of their three sons, she was seeking her freedom. Nobody that day wanted to know the truth. Though it was as simple as a musical tune: a sound for a sound, a word for a word; a girl for a boy." A girl for a boy...
Slightly more sophisticated but still in the line of replacing girl for boy is Mona Ibrahim's entertaining Al-Shatra Budur (Clever Budur). It is an attempt to create the character of a little girl who is ingenious, a Shatra Budur to match the traditional boy Al-Shatir Hassan (Clever Hassan who invariably falls in love with Sitt Al-Husn wa Al- Gamal, "Mistress of Grace and Beauty"). Mona creates a girl who manages, through traditional female tricks, to save her own people.
But as the writers develop more skills, and as they undergo different life experiences, their stories mature. More subtle, and somewhat touching, is Omayma Abu Bakr's story Musbah Alaaeddin (Alaaeddin's Lantern). Unlike many of the other stories, this one is about a little boy, perhaps because Omayma Abu Bakr is herself the mother of two boys. This Alaaeddin's lantern releases a fairy (and not a jinn) who offers to fulfil three wishes -- but alas she can't provide power, money or treasures. Her magic, instead, is "to change from one state to another." The little boy first asks her to alter the long-held traditions of his people that dictate that grown ups should love only blue and youngsters should love only green, for he loves the blue sea and the blue sky. But then he misses the green grass and the green trees. He misses the bright yellow of the shining sun, the red glow of the setting sun, and the white of clouds. "Why are you trying to decide for others what to love and what to hate?", the fairy asks him. "Why should you decide what is supposed to be, expected and natural? Did God create only one colour or even two or three? Did God create grown ups in a world and young ones in another? Did God make us judges over each other's hearts to decide what to love and what to hate?" Alaaeddin finally decides on his third wish, please make everybody young and old love all colours -- as they each choose. This fairy's magic colours the world.
In such stories, Hala Kamal explains, "feminist" values are promoted, encouraging tolerance, acceptance of the other, multiplicity and diversity as opposed to what she terms "patriarchal" values promoting the pursuit of wealth and power. And here one senses an infinitely more nuanced and subtle view of feminism, one that goes beyond simple "girl for boy."
The group have held several story-telling evenings at different venues, including Beit Al-Harrawi, the Spanish Cultural Centre and on the margins of the Qasim Amin conference held by the SCC. They also performed last week at the Oriental Hall of the American University in Cairo.
But with such venues, who are they hoping to reach? Aren't they, by addressing highly educated audiences, who -- one would surely hope -- are already gender conscious and gender sensitive, somehow preaching to the converted?
Even the converted are happy to be entertained by the stories and in them find material and inspiration to retell stories themselves, replied Hala Kamal. But whereas the first couple of years of the workshop were devoted more to laying the groundwork and defining basic concepts and methodologies, the story telling workshop has now begun to reach out to other communities, perhaps unconverted. They have experimented with holding story telling gatherings at a school in Mit Uqba, a youth summer camp affiliated to the Ministry of Agriculture and at a woman's community association in Helwan. And the reaction of those mostly-women audiences was enthusiastic to the experiment.
The group select stories to include depending on the venue and audience -- some are more geared towards children, others towards working women's concerns and so on.
In reaching the group has refined its story telling skills and techniques. But given that they are all academics and creative writers, not professional performers, they have requested the help of Caroline Khalil as story telling trainer and director.
I spoke with an euphoric Caroline Khalil after the Oriental Hall performance, her first cooperation with the story telling workshop. She found the work exciting. "Even though the tellers are non-performers some of them have an instinct, a flair for story telling and most of them are involved in the writing and so they're motivated and they have sincere relationships with those stories." Of course, story telling as performances are quite different from acting, for the teller is not being a character but rather conveying several characters as well as a narrator who is distinct from the characters in the story. A lot of work has to be done with the voices, Caroline explained "to allow the audience to draw images from the story. I would like to play more with the lights and to work on the story tellers' voices and pitch more in upcoming performances."
The setting at Oriental Hall was itself reminiscent of a living room, the traditional homey setting of women's story telling. The tellers were arranged in a semi circle with Oud player Nayef Kweidar (one has to say this: he was the only man in the group!) playing between stories and sometimes as background to stories. The chairs were also arranged in a semi-circle, facing the tellers. The storytellers weren't dressed in any particular costumes, instead each chose her own clothes but added some oriental touch to match the setting; a shawl, a necklace.
But these tellers are all affiliated to the WMF, what about Caroline? Is she herself committed to the same feminist cause? "You are a feminist simply by being a woman," she asserted. "I'm not devoted exclusively to women's issues but of course I'm interested." What she also finds appealing is that these stories offer a balanced way to discuss gender issues, and that the women are expressing themselves creatively through this work not just performing someone else's creation.
As the group develops its story telling techniques they are also reaching out to more grassroots organisations. In addition to more entertainment style evenings geared towards the supposedly converted they are also exploring more advocacy oriented settings. This involves systematic work with a specific group of people over a period of time in order to raise gender consciousness. One project they are pursuing is holding story-telling sessions at schools and training school teachers to themselves create, and tell, gender sensitive stories. By doing so they hope to spread those ideals -- of fairness, equal opportunity, diversity and multiplicity -- they believe are at the heart of feminism.
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