Abstract
As one of the leading figures of the 1919 Revolution in Egypt, Huda Sha’rawi played a key role in Egyptian women’s nationalism on both the domestic and international stages. This chapter studies the Arabic (1981) “original” and the English (1987) translation of Sha’rawi’s memoirs to contextualize and complicate the image of Arab women’s involvement in the Egyptian political sphere in the first two decades of the last century. Ayad argues that both versions of Sha’rawi’s memoirs are translations, in the broader sense of the term as a form of adaptation rather than the quest for linguistic transfer and equivalence as they are normally understood.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
See Mohja Kahf’s “Packaging ‘Huda’: Sha’rawi’s Memoirs in the United States Reception Environment” (2000) for a thoughtful and thorough analysis of Badran’s translation.
- 3.
Some of the scholarship includes Beth Baron (1994) The Women’s Awakening in Egypt; S. Asha, “The Intersection of the Personal and the Political: Huda Shaarawi’s Harem Years and Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage” (2012); Nawar al-Hassan Golley, Reading Arab Women’s Autobiography: Shahrazad Tells her Story (2003); and Nabila Ramdani, “Women in the 1919 Egyptian Revolution: From Feminist Awakening to Nationalist Political Activism” (2013).
- 4.
The scholarship on unequal relations of translation is vast and thorough: Mona Baker “Reframing Conflict in Translation”(2007), Marilyn Booth “ ‘The Muslim Woman as Celebrity Author and the Politics of Translating Arabic: Girls of Riyadh Go on the Road” (2010), Richard Jacquemond “Translation and Cultural Hegemony: The Case of French-Arabic Translation” (1992), Tejaswini Niranjana Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context (1992), Gisele Sapiro “Translation and the Field of Publishing: A Commentary on Pierre Bourdieu’s “A Conservative Revolution in Publishing.” (2008), Gillian Whitlock Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit (2007), Lawrence Venuti The Scandals of Translation (1998).
- 5.
This study is not alone in calling for a re-evaluation of translation and reception theory and practice in the Arab context. See, for example, Tetz Rooke’s “Autobiography, Modernity, and Translation” (2004) and Michelle Hartman’s “Gender, Genre, and the (Missing) Gazelle: Arab Women Writers and the Politics of Translation” (2012).
- 6.
The Wafd Party – a secularist, nationalist movement – had the support of Egyptians from all social classes. Under the leadership of both Muslim and Coptic notables, among which were Sa’d Zaghlul, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Fahmi, and Huda Sha’rawi’s husband, Ali Sha’rawi, the Wafd party became the center of an anti-British movement of national unity which stressed the complete independence, making no mention of any external solidarity. The Party’s manifesto, drawn up in January 1919 for presentation at the Allied Power’s peace conference in Paris, proclaimed that the Egyptian population now formed “a single and unique race, perfectly homogenous in its physique as in its mentality and its manners.” (quoted in Gershoni and Jankowski’s Egypt, Islam and the Arabs, 42–43). See also Selma Botman Egypt from Independence to Revolution, 1919 –1952 ( 1991).
- 7.
For a thorough overview of the differences between the two genres in English literary criticism see Julie Rak “Are Memoirs Autobiography? A Consideration of Genre and Public Identity” (2004).
- 8.
Marvin Zonis (1991: 62) accounts for the paucity of autobiography and biography in the Middle East, by explaining “that concepts of the individual and individualism assume different dimensions in the Middle Eastern and in Western cultures.”
- 9.
Indeed, Ali Yusuf, (quoted in Ayalon 1995: 58) editor of al-Mu’ayyad (“the Strengthened, or Victorious”) wrote that the Egyptians were resisting the English colonial occupation through “the press, the only weapon that the occupier has left in the hands of the nationalist to repel that which is objectionable.”
- 10.
See also Yasir Suleiman, Arabic in the Fray: Language Ideology and Cultural Politics (2013).
- 11.
- 12.
Baron (1994: 84–85; 138–140) recounts an anecdote by Labiba Hashim, the publisher of the famed woman’s magazine Fatat al-Sharq, as well as the first Arab woman to hold the position of lecturer at the Egyptian University. She highlights the dangers of Arabic illiteracy through the story of a young woman who applied carbolic acid to her hand thinking it was cologne. When asked why she had not read the label, she blamed it on her having studied French, not Arabic. Similarly, the American traveler Elizabeth Cooper (1914: 345) observed women reading Browning and Tennyson and conversed with women fluent in French and English.
- 13.
Gershoni and Jankowski (1986: 40) describe the 1919 Revolution as a “political phenomenon, aiming at no socioeconomic transformation of class structure and as a result achieving none (the rural uprisings of 1919 were quickly repressed and were not repeated.”
Indeed, Sha’rawi was blind to her class privileges, made evident by the episode in which Sha’rawi, Rushdi Hanim decide to build a tennis court in Mustafa Riad Basha’s garden. She writes (1981: 99)
Often we would exercise in the Giza and its gardens. And our discussion would often be around looking for a practical, feasible way to reach the improvement of the Egyptian woman’s case…We settled on starting our project by directing the woman to practice physical exercise first…we decided to establish a tennis court.
The project ultimately fails, – “I will not forget the disappointment and failure that ensured when we explained the matter to our Ladies [the invitees] (100)” – when, during the opening ceremony, none of the women present set foot on the tennis court. This episode exposing Sha’rawi’s blindness to her class privileges does not appear in Harem Years.
- 14.
Beth Baron (1994: 82) warns, however, that these censuses were not the most reliable, since they were supervised by different directors and “did not have uniform definitions and variable.” However, even though women’s literacy was on the rise, reading, especially of political material, remained largely a male-dominated activity.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge the Josephine de Karman Foundation Fellowship and the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California for supporting this research. I would also like to thank Mohammed Albakry, the editor of this volume, for his keen intellectual eye and his sharp insight. Profound thanks go to Azza Ayad, who helped me with the Arabic translation, and with so much more than she could imagine; Benny Tran, whose patience with the process of translation calmed me; as well as Vanessa Raabe, Gino Conti and Sandra Kim, who read and commented on the article at different stages. I am also incredibly, and forever, indebted to Antonia Szabari, Olivia Harrison, and Sarah Gualtieri—my models for scholarship, generosity and grace.
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Ayad, N. (2017). Between Huda Sha’rawi’s Memoirs and Harem Years . In: Albakry, M. (eds) Translation and the Intersection of Texts, Contexts and Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53748-1_6
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