Profile Love made visible

Azza Fahmi:
Love made visible
Looking at stones, she sees colour and spirit
Profile by Mona Ghandour
Everyone loves Azza Fahmi's work -- even if, recognisable at a distance of ten paces, it is likely to elicit first the comment "oh, that's Azza Fahmi, isn't it?", and only then the long-drawn-out, envious sigh of "it's soooo beautiful." This is true even if some people snipe that her work is getting "more commercial with her success." Sour grapes? The past few collections, it's true, have been unaffordable to a great many of her fans. But this is only a by-product of her success, after all -- although it is ironic that the woman best known for making traditional Bedouin and peasant jewellery eminently covetable by the cultured upper-middle classes now sells much of her output abroad, and, at home, to the more Westernised members of the population.
There is no denying that her talent, and her media friendliness, are recognised East and West. She has exhibited, it seems, everywhere: from Saudi Arabia to Denmark, Jordan to Italy, Frankfurt to Lebanon, Egypt to the US. Fahmi's clients include the Brooklyn Museum and the Institut du Monde Arabe as well as Saks Fifth Avenue and Nordstrom's -- not to mention intelligent men on several continents who know the effect a necklace or a ring designed by her can have (according to an informal poll, recipients exhibit symptoms including, but not restricted to, hyperventilation, extreme gratitude, and adoring disbelief).
This, then, is a success story: that of a young girl from Sohag who forged a place in the world. Azza Fahmi's career may be summed up in a few words. After studies in applied arts, she became an apprentice learning her craft from a master jeweller in Khan Al-Khalili. Today, she owns a large firm and has apprentices of her own. Her pieces -- inspired by Egyptian, Bedouin, and Arab motifs, drawing on folklore or the physical environment -- are not, however, reproductions of traditional pieces that cater to the tourist market; nor can they be classified as mass produced accessories.
Azza Fahmi's childhood was a happy one, her family close-knit. Her paternal grandmother was Sudanese. Her mother, like many women of her generation, did not finish school, but could read, and spoke French. Her father grew up in Khartoum, where he studied at Gordon College and was exposed early on to Western culture and principles of women's emancipation. The ideas he absorbed almost certainly determined his approach to his daughter's education. His library contained many foreign books, especially works of history. He had a passion for art and beauty, and his daughter adored him.
But when she was only 15, her father died and the days of carefree childhood were gone. Azza and her brothers and sisters had to endure the loss of the emotional and economic hardship the loss of this lodestar entailed.
At Helwan University's Faculty of Applied Arts, she majored in ornamentation and decoration. She graduated in 1965, and for eight years designed the covers of books published by the Egyptian Information Authority (EIA). The job brought her a salary, but was hardly what she yearned to do. She seemed to be waiting for a revelation of some sort.
At last there was light. "It happened in 1974, at the first Cairo International Book Fair. As I stood leafing through an illustrated book on mediaeval European jewellery, new vistas seemed to unfold before my eyes: a world of beauty, art and intricate craftsmanship. I paid my month's salary to purchase the book, for I could not leave without it." The family was angry at her extravagance, but her mind was already made up: she would become a master jeweller. It was not an excessive investment, since it was to inform her entire future.
Eyes fixed firmly on her goal, she had to decide on the course she would follow: return to the Faculty of Applied Arts for four more years, or take a short-cut and work with her hands, as apprentice to a master craftsman? The second alternative, being more direct, was more to her liking.
Two years with Usta Ramadan at Khan Al-Khalili turned Fahmi into a professional jeweller. The new world she discovered in the ancient souq fascinated her. "My new experience was out of the ordinary for any conventional, young Egyptian woman in a traditional environment," she recalls, "but I was determined to go on." A young university graduate and a woman to boot, she may have seemed a little out of place in the circle of craftsmen, but she did her best to adjust to the conditions of work, and her colleagues soon took to her, accepted her, taught her and considered her no outsider. She made friends with their wives, visiting them and going along on their outings to the public baths.
Khan Al-Khalili, and especially the Sagha or Goldsmiths' Market, was a world unto itself. Each workshop specialised in one product: one makes cartouches, another key chains, a third wedding rings... A jeweller who could produce the entire range of goods was called the "catalogue maker" and considered a step above the other workshops. Armenians dominated the trade, yet many Egyptian masters ran private workshops.
She learned to wield the tools of the craft, making only a few rings at first; these, however, already incorporated the crescent-and-star motif that was to be her hallmark for many years. "Usta Mekkawi showed me antique pieces of silver jewellery. While the intention was to buy the old pieces as scrap to melt and made into new pieces, I kept some of the most beautiful pieces for myself: anklets, earrings, bracelets... They made up the core of my collection of rare pieces of silver jewellery, which testify to the stages of the development of the craft over time."
At the workshop, she especially admired Usta Sayed, a highly skilled artisan who had mastered the most difficult techniques of the trade. She was determined that she would not rest until she had mastered them too.
"I was a young, hard-working woman," she reminisces. "Once the day's work at the EIA was over, I would walk from Talaat Harb Street to Khan Al-Khalili, to save the piastre and a half in bus fare, because I knew I could use it to buy a little silver, which cost 32 milliemes a gramme. On the way I would buy a fuul and egg sandwich, which I devoured on my way to the workshop.
At night, in a small room in Helwan, Fahmi would practice the techniques she had learned from Usta Sayed during the day. Earrings and rings took on new shapes as her fingers worked. She looked out of the window, its sill lined with pots of water cooling in the breeze, and listlessly admired the beauty of the landscape.
Hands-on experience soon revealed its limitations, however. Fahmi grew tired of flat designs with surface engravings: she felt an intense desire to engage with space more actively, but did not have the skill to execute the sculpted pieces of which she dreamed. As far as she was concerned, "making jewellery was a form of sculpture."
"My apprenticeship had reached a stage when I needed a certain level of academic scientific knowledge," she explains. The master craftsman to whom she was apprenticed had the knowledge borne of experience accumulated over the years, "but no scientific explanations to satisfy my inquisitive mind."
Then a fairy godmother made an impromptu appearance in the form of a British Council fellowship to study jewellery-making at the London Polytechnic. "In London I learned the theoretical aspects and underlying principles of what I had learned to do in practice, with my hands, in Egypt," she says. In return, her professors took a keen interest in the calligraphic designs she could execute.
Back in Egypt, she continued her autodidactic crash course, consulting books and museum displays to find out as much as she could about Fatimid, Ayyubid, Mamluke and Ottoman jewellery, and visiting the oases where silversmiths still worked much as they had for centuries. Examining standard designs, and every possible variation thereon, Fahmi gradually came to know her craft both conceptually and practically wit the intimacy that only complete immersion can produce. Her work is distinctive, however, for its studied exclusion of explicit Pharaonic references. There is always a risk, she contends, of cheapening the difficult art of Ancient Egypt by placing it at the service of consumerist considerations.
After she had completed her first piece successfully, she made five more, which she sold to friends; another five followed, which friends sold to friends... It was all very encouraging. She laughs nostalgically at the memory: "I wonder today whether all the people who bought those rings were honestly fascinated by my work, or whether they did it to encourage me..." Whatever the case may have been, surely the legions of clients whom Fahmi's work continued to attract thereafter were not adorning themselves with her creations just to make her happy.
One of the first collections that won her wide appeal, and which many associate with the instantly recognisable impact of an "Azza Fahmi piece," was titled Houses of the Nile. Inspired by Nubia, it featured silver brooches, earrings, rings and pendants shaped like small houses and gorgeously encrusted with palm trees or rocks fashioned from turquoise and coral -- the materials she prefers to work with, although "what I find particularly attractive about a stone are its spirit and colour."
"Most of us would not think of wearing a mud house," a clearly besotted journalist wrote at the time. "Azza Fahmi did." The writer continued: "Her rendering of the mud houses is completely devoid of any imposed sophistication or factitious aesthetic values. It is as if she does not feel that she is in any way dignifying the medium of mud by representing it in silver, but rather that silver work is dignifying itself by assuming the aesthetic values of mud."
Always searching for new sources of inspiration that would shape her creations, Fahmi also read poetry and inscribed verses in letters of gold on silver necklaces, bracelets, earrings and rings, or engraved them on key chains and amulets. This was not simply ornamentation: the wearers of these pieces chose them with their eyes, but also for a meaning that seemed to echo the recesses of the soul. Some pieces bear verses from colloquial poet Salah Jahin's Ruba'iyat ("I am the one who leapt into the air..."); others, lines by Sufis like Al-Hallaj or Rab'a Al-Adawiya. That is one reason Fahmi's work appeals so much, especially to women with the educated sort of sensibility that embraces pan-Arabism and cultural authenticity as objective ideals -- and with the means to wear such principles, made beautifully manifest, around their necks or pinned to a lapel. Azza Fahmi, many say, has brought traditional art out of the captivity in which it was held behind museum doors, and caused it to vibrate with life. And Fahmi likes to quote Khalil Gibran:
"All knowledge is vain save when there is work,
And all work is empty save when there is love."
Today, Fahmi heads a firm that employs 65 workers. She has built something of an empire, yet it preserves a breath of its artisanal roots. She has diversified her products, creating a line of jewellery, titled Banat Banat, for younger women as well as more sophisticated pieces incorporating pearls, gold and precious stones. She is especially effervescent when speaking of the work she has done for cinema and theatre. Theatre director Nidal Al-Ashqar is a close friend, and Fahmi designed the jewelry and costumes for two plays by Saadallah Wannous: Tuqous Al-Isharat wal-Tahawwulat (Rituals of Signs and Transformations), which Al-Ashqar directed, and Munamnamat Tarikhiya (Historical Miniatures). She was responsible, too, for the striking pieces worn in such films as Shafiqa wa Mitwalli, directed by Ali Badrakhan, and Youssef Chahine's Al-Masir.
Today, Fahmi is working on a book about Khan Al-Khalili, which she also envisions as a compendium of jewellery from the rural areas, the deserts, the Delta and Nubia. She intends it to clarify the various influences that Pakistan, Afghanistan, India and other cultures have had on Egyptian jewellery, but which are generally lumped together as authentically Egyptian. Her daughters contribute to the family's professional life: Amina, who is studying jewellery design in Florence, hopes to become involved in the artistic dimensions of Fahmi's work, while Fatima will take care of marketing and management. As they grow more experienced and take on larger shares of the work load, Fahmi has a little more time to herself -- time to sit on her balcony in the early morning, to look at the Nile, and to lose herself in the beauty of the river and its shady banks. She is thinking, no doubt, of a new collection.
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