Sadallah Wannous (1941-1997), a leading Syrian playwright, was concerned in his political theater with preaching democracy and raising the awareness of the masses in order to have more involvement in the public arena. His drama was hurdled with censorship and he had to find indirect ways in his plays to instigate opposition. This article investigates whether the lack of freedom of expression curbs the creativity of the dramatist. My aim is to study and evaluate the dramatic techniques Wannous used in his attempt to circumvent censorship. This is mainly done through a critique of his plays in the light of my textual analysis, Wannous’s statements in his non dramatic writing and available literary criticism. Wannous’s polemical play An Evening for the fifth of June (1967-8) was banned after the first performance. Two later plays were chosen for this study; The King’s Elephant (1969) and The King is King (1977). In both plays, Wannous analyzed the nature of authoritarianism and the psyche of the repressed majority, and urged for dissent in far fetched plots that do not directly reflect the status quo. To do so, he made extensive use of fables, folk tales, allegory and symbolism. By exploring new theatrical modes, Wannous was able, not only to politicize the masses, but also to produce high quality art that is thought-provoking and entertaining at the same time. For the purpose of economy I limited my article to two plays. However The Adventure of the Slave Jaber’s Head (1970) is very pertinent to the main question herein and can be added later in a more extended book-length study.
This article will examine the activism of Aliaa Magda Elmahdy, or the “nude Egyptian blogger,” to reflect on the pause that naked bodies insert into civic life and to evaluate nudity as means of protest in Egyptian as well as transnational feminist politics. By “making visible what had no business being seen,” to quote Jacques Rancière, Elmahdy’s nude body reconfigures the body politic and reimagines the theater of the political. Her activism incorporates two distinct phases. Elmahdy initially launched her nude body into the blogosphere to mark the Arab revolutions as a highly sexualized topography. By elevating gender and sexuality to the forefront of local and global geopolitical conversations, Elmahdy brought sex to Tahrir Square, or underscored its primacy there. Her more recent alliance with the global feminist organization Femen reveals points of tension with her virtual revisioning of the body politic, given her affiliation with an arguably Islamophobic, neocolonial feminist agenda on the streets. Yet both phases of Elmahdy’s activism enlist her body where least expected in order to challenge the patriarchal cartography of Tahrir Square and the gendering of national space more broadly, as well as to re-member the global feminist public square.
Youssef Chahine (1926–2008), Egypt’s most celebrated director, made forty-two films over six decades. His work, which runs the gamut from social realism to melodrama, musical comedy to grand historical spectacle, resisted easy compartmentalization. In his final film, Hiyya Fawda (Chaos, 2007), he returned to a favorite theme, Egypt’s national predicament, dispensing with his recent propensity to couch his criticism in allegorical/historical garb. This paper reads Chahine’s final film as a coda to his career, highlighting several key themes—political corruption and state brutality, sexual longing and deviancy—that reference, sometimes directly, his earlier classic work. Chahine’s depiction of Egypt marks him as a prescient, courageous observer of Egypt on the brink of an “Arab Spring,” perhaps even an oracle, certainly a romantic. The ending of his final film may be typically sentimental, but it is certainly less unbelievable than when the filming ended, even if it remains a cautionary tale.