The unsuspected complexities of a Ramadan icon Wasifa's permutations Profile by Youssef Rakha Click for bigger images Inaam Salousa is a well-known actress. So much can be asserted with confidence. Yet her career commenced long before her name came to the notice of the public and it is the interim, a time of disillusion and often of distress, that seems to have defined her professional sense of self to a far greater extent than any subsequent celebrity. Salousa's multifold contribution to the profession of acting includes being an elocution mistress (she is known to have coached the late Soad Hosni in the 1950s). She first came to the attention of the public in La Tutfi' Al-Shams (Don't Put Out the Sun), a popular television drama, dating from the 1960s, in which she played the protagonist's sister, a nerdy entomologist in love. So masterfully did she capture the character traits of a difficult archetype -- self-conscious, anal retentive, too devoted to her studies to develop socially -- that she managed to escape the straight-jacket of immediate typecasting. True, she did become the obvious choice for anyone seeking to cast a similar role but she was equally in demand when other complex and tormented characters needed an actress. In short Salousa was branded a difficult-character actress, equally at home with tragedy and comedy. "There is no such thing as a comedian or tragedian," she says. "There are only good and bad actors. An actor may or may not have a sense of humour. It has nothing to do with skill." It may have been her increasing devotion to the high-brow stage -- contributions to television and cinema were few and far between -- that initially placed her at a slight remove from mainstream commercial channels. But, however she has come to view things in retrospect, she undoubtedly found her calling. Wavering on the edge of a teaching career, Salousa had considered becoming a news anchor. But briefly, and with remarkable success, she established herself as a radio, television and stage actress. Then, in 1967-8, she travelled to France with her husband, veteran director and Ministry of Culture official Samir El-Asfouri, who had received a bursary to study in Paris. On returning Salousa felt that, professionally, there was no longer anywhere to go. She was unemployed. "Sometimes two or three years would go by with me just sitting there," she remembers. Then, once upon a Ramadan, she played a small role in what was to be one of the most popular televised serial dramas ever, Layali Al- Hilmiya (Hilmiya Nights). In the public imagination Salousa was instantly identified with Wasifa, the simple-minded provincial wife of umda-turned-pasha Soliman Ghanem (delightfully played by Salah El- Saadani). Many successful appearances followed, particularly on the television screen. "My children had grown up by then," she says, "and so it seemed a suitable time to engage in the kind of work I had missed out on for such a long time. They are now both married and it's only fair that I should have work to do. I am perfectly happy," she adds. This Ramadan, going through yet another of her incarnations, Wasifa has appeared in Goha Al-Masri (Egyptian Goha), a prime-time serial drama written by Yosri El-Guindi, directed by Magdi Abu Emeira and featuring Yehia El-Fakharani, Soad Nasr, Ahmed Rateb, Lucy and Mona Zaki. And yet a face-to-face encounter with Wasifa turns out to be somewhat disconcerting. Her brandname characteristics -- simplicity, warmth and heart-warming spontaneity -- are less pronounced than they appear on screen. The person who emerges turns out to be less open, too -- "I'm not used to this kind of thing" is the explanation she supplies -- and the earthbound melancholy embedded in Wasifa's demeanour before long condenses into the kind of detachment that usually bespeaks disenchantment. This, perhaps, is a function of her seasoned distrust of the media from whose arbitrary attentions she has clearly suffered. During our 45-minute conversation Salousa gradually warms to her themes, revealing a self-possession that encompasses not only the suggestion of resentment but a deep-seated modesty -- one that, admirable as it might be, tends to obscure the magnitude of her status. Yet her impatience with the photographer's attempt to persuade her to relocate to a place in which she might be more comfortable reveals that, modest as she might be, she likes to remain in control. "If there is one part of the house where you like to spend time," he begins. "There isn't," Salousa almost snaps. "There is this one living-room in there and I spend all my time in it;" and as she says so it is clear Salousa has no intention of letting us into that room. "Nowhere else," her tone alters again; she is suddenly sympathetic. Punctuated by muted sighs, photo-related protestations and irresolute grunts, Salousa's discourse progresses along a well defined if circuitous route -- its I-am-happy testimonials emphasising both self- possession and modesty. She is palpably more interested in the present than the past. "Only after I played Wasifa did they begin to pick me;" the "they", presumably a reference to producers, directors and other powers that be, sounds a little too Kafkaesque for comfort. "It seems their strategy is to wait until the actor gives up all hope, loses all patience. And maybe that actor will commit suicide before they decide to pick him..." She qualifies the latter, somewhat melodramatic remark: "Because it can be terribly, heart-rendingly demoralising to just wait and wait, when acting is all you want to do with your life. I used to suffer horrible psychological crises, of course, horrible crises. Depression. That happens when you're used to work and suddenly there is nothing for you to do any more. To just sit there makes you feel as if there is no use for you in life. How could I overcome this problem?" Salousa sounds suddenly prudent. "I took up sewing. I thought I should have a hobby. It wasn't something I liked at all -- in fact I positively disliked it -- but it was time-consuming enough to serve its purpose. I became very good at sewing, in fact, even though I didn't like it at all. Can you imagine?" Even the Wasifa breakthrough did not feel like a great achievement, she implies: "That role had made the rounds thoroughly before it landed in my lap. Every actress in the country had rejected it. And not surprisingly, once you realise that, in that first part of the serial, it amounted to nine scenes out of a total of the 600-700 that would go into 17 episodes. Yet after Wasifa," she adds, "I was suddenly in demand and inexplicably popular." "I just don't remember," is one of her stock responses to questions about specific stages of her career. "All I know is that it had never occurred to me to be an actress," she says, striving to recollect her earliest beginnings. "When we were children my father -- he was a well-to-do fabric merchant in Mansoura, where I was born -- was already old, I only remember him with white hair on his head. But he was very open-minded, he was more of a friend to us than our mother. So we grew up like boys, independent-minded and self confident," Salousa explains. "It was acting at university that changed the course of my life. Initially I came to Cairo to be a teacher. I enrolled at the Faculty of Arts, Ain Shams University; and at first I went to the Oriental Languages Department, where I studied Hebrew, Turkish, Farsi. That turned out to be extremely difficult, however, so I decided to transfer to something more viable. And I felt the one department in which I was guaranteed to pursue my studies with success, realistically, was the Arabic Department; so that is where I decided to go. Then, eventually, I joined the acting team..." On arriving in Cairo Salousa stayed with an older cousin, "the age of my father," but eventually, as her sisters began to flock to Cairo to attend university (Salousa was the eldest of three daughters, the other two having grown up to be a bank clerk and musician-housewife), the entire family moved there. "Like many families with provincial origins we moved to Shubra" where the university campus was located, "but I remember my image among Cairene girls," she elaborates. "I really did look like a fellaha: I had braids, for example; my accent and the manner in which I conducted myself were different; and even though I came from a relatively well off family -- my clothes were always spick-and- span -- the way I dressed was markedly different and felt inferior. Especially when I got angry, my voice would immediately turn provincial even after I acquired the Cairo accent. Naturally this would sometimes solicit an amused response." And even though she married an artist, soon after settling in Cairo, in doing so Salousa seems to have been following the sedately conventional life path predetermined by her middle-class upbringing. "My family life is absolutely ordinary," she confesses. "Very stable. My husband," she goes on to explain, "is a kind man; he doesn't have too many demands -- he's not exhausting to live with. And he treats us well." The statement is punctuated by an ironic smile. "He's so democratic he won't implement a plan of action until he has called a family round table to consult with us, but then," she adds, laughing faintly, "he'll do what he wants regardless." She settles back uneasily, ready to field the next question. This line of thought would seem to be corroborated by her position on one of her two daughters' desire to be a director (the other daughter is an accountant working in the tourism industry). "She spent some of the most important years of her childhood in Paris so her French has always been outstanding," Salousa says of her daughter, now an appointee of the Egyptian Television's satellite Specialised Channels. "And I was trying to persuade her to enter the diplomatic corps, for one auspicious option -- the latest plan was for her to work as a simultaneous interpreter -- when suddenly I found out she was trying to apply to the [Cinema] Institute. I went so far as to call up all my friends there to try and persuade them to fail her on purpose, as it were. But she passed. Now I am resigned to it, which does not mean that I would have agreed." She had never banked on being an actress herself, she insists. "It had never even occurred to me that I could act, although I used to mimic people quite effectively. But I liked art," she recalls. "I was into music but my performance wasn't so outstanding. Our weekend outing in Mansoura tended to consist of going to the cinema, though. And I really enjoyed that." Even her joining of the university acting team, she says, was by way of making up for the lack of musical opportunities in the university community, music being her extracurricular activity of choice. "No music, they said. But there is acting. And when I went they gave me a line and said, say this. So I did and they were very pleased, I don't know why. Eventually I enrolled in the Acting Institute while still at university. I realised that at heart I didn't want to be a teacher, and I found myself enjoying acting a lot. So I did both together, yes; sometimes I would even have two different examinations on the same day. I pulled through." Salousa speaks of no role models or influences. "To this day I sit and watch actors and actresses, following how they operate. You could say that too is a hobby of mine," though her tone makes it sound like a masochistic hobby. "I've always liked to see how people do it; I suppose the exercise must have affected me, however indirectly. But I never fell under the influence of anybody in particular, no, nothing specific I can tell you about. Had somebody decided to adopt me professionally that might have happened. Had somebody paid attention to me during my formative years I might have ended up being influenced by that person or by people I worked with. As it is they did not start employing me until recently..." Her abortive attempt to become a news anchor -- a compromise, one takes it, for which her faculty degree qualified her -- was soon followed by a small role in Nadia, a popular radio drama of the early 1960s, with actress Karima Mokhtar and director Mohamed Elwan. It was through such initially routine encounters (undertaken within the framework of her institute course, largely after her graduation from Ain Shams University) that Salousa entered the acting arena, forging links with drama directors, eventually taking larger roles in radio and television dramas and acquiring a central position in the then high-brow government-sponsored Television (later State) Theatres. Most of her subsequent work, she recalls, was in Al-Masrah Al-Alami, that division of the Television Theatres that presented world classics. "The pressure on us was great, we did a new play every month. Even the day I got married I was doing rehearsals for a performance in Cairo by day while at the same time performing in Alexandria by night. For a long time I never did anything for television. I did theatre, and I had barely begun to do cinema when I travelled." A slight shift of tone here, a barely perceptible wince: is she ever so slightly resentful of the fact? "I am very happy," Salousa says again. "I have no further demands. What's important to say is that I enjoyed every role I played; every role in which I invested effort I enjoyed doing, up to and including the role of Wasifa, which was so small no other actress was willing to do it. There had been roles before then, too -- in Dubai- or Abu-Dhabi-funded serial dramas, for example. And I enjoyed them equally. "It was Wasifa that propelled me into the limelight, though, if you like. And at least it let me out of the mould that had been cast for me prior to my departure -- that of the complicated, intellectual, nerdy young woman; except that this happened a little late, as I've said. And maybe that has to do with the fact that I'm a very homey person. I was never socially involved in actors' and directors' circles; I never am. Even my invitation to the private screening of Muhami Khul'," her latest cinematic appearance, "was lost; and I still haven't seen the film. Samir was often very busy," she says in a rare moment of openness, "and I couldn't always move without him. But I am happy," she repeats; and the same wry smile appears on her face. "Now that my children no longer need my care, it's good to know I have work to do. And given that this took so long to start happening, it's not as distressing when I don't."
