Nehad Selaiha thoroughly enjoys Fathiya El-Assal's Without Words at Al-Ghad, but finds the title a blatant misnomer Like many leftwing feminists and women-rights activists, Fathiya El-Assal tends to view the oppression of women in a wider perspective, as part of a complex web of interrelated socio-political, economic and ideological forces. In such a context, which takes heed of the concrete particularities of historical and political reality and tacitly links female oppression to the rise of capitalism, not only women, but also men, and almost to an equal degree, emerge as victims. In both cases the sources of oppression are the same: the rabid exploitation of human labour, which breeds need, poverty and helpless submission, and the erosion of individual will and integrity under the unquestioned sway of a dominant, backward, patriarchal ideology which valorizes blind obedience within the family, the tribe and the state and often resorts to moral hypocrisy, manipulating religion to enforce it and to maintain its power. In such a setup, men become dehumanized, cogs in a ruthless economic machine, and in their frustration vent their violence on the weaker parties, consistently abusing, both mentally and physically, their wives and children. In response, the women either rebel, risking public condemnation and social ostracism in their search for freedom; meekly swallow their grievances, taking refuge in silence and becoming robot- like; grow morally corrupt and deceitful and, like the women of Venice according to Iago, "do let God see the pranks/ They dare not show their husbands"; or become thoroughly brainwashed into accepting, even defending their degraded status as both natural and right, bequeathing this conviction to their offspring. In the latter case they could easily turn into cruel travesties of their male oppressors, often exercising harsher forms of subjection on their daughters while warping the characters of their sons by turning them into budding dictators. These ideas keep cropping up in El-Assal's stage and radio plays, as well as in her many television serials, and are dominant themes in her recently published four-volume autobiography, Hudhn El-'Omr (The Embrace of a Lifetime). Indeed, for anyone familiar with her work and history, they seem to constitute the ideological framework not only of her writing, but also of her private life, personal relationships and political activities. Even in her earliest and most traditional play, Al-Murgiha (The Swing, 1967) -- a realistic comedy of intrigue, involving disguise, and centering on the hilarious attempts of a naïve housewife to retrieve her husband from the clutches of a seductress -- one could detect in the positive heroine a celebration of female initiative and a groping for a redefinition of the marital bond as one in which the woman is as active as the man and which involves human solidarity and mutual respect. Later on, and as she politically and artistically matured, El-Assal's socialist ideas and feminist views became more pressing and pronounced, leading her to experiment with form in search of a suitable dramatic mode that could accommodate them without sinking the plays in sloganeering or turning them into propaganda sheets. Her best achievements in this direction where theatre is concerned are Nisaa bila Aqni'ah (Women without Masks, written in 1975 but not performed till the mid-1980s with the word 'women' removed from the title by the censor) and Sign Al-Nisaa (Women's Prison), written in 1982 after a spell in prison as a political detainee and staged more than a decade later at the National. In both the content was decidedly, intimately feminist, and in her efforts to trace what Catherine Clement has called, according to Mary Eagleton, the 'missing links' which "relate politics to the poetic, the social and collective to the personal and familial, the class struggle to the language of desire," El-Assal firmly turned her back on the traditional formula of the well- made play which she found restricting. Instead, she opted for a confessional mode in multiple voices, all female and all oppressed, refracting the dramatic focus among them and using the stories as different manifestations of female oppression, played in a variety of emotional keys, ranging from the hilariously sarcastic to the deeply poignant. In both plays, the structure does not take the form of linear plot-progression towards a climax, a male-oriented form according to some feminists, but proceeds, not unlike folk narratives, through calculated interruptions, digressions and the accumulation of fragments which ultimately make up a whole and create a strong impact. Instead of one action and one climax we have several, yielding shocking revelations, painful confrontations, honest questionings of the social and cultural heritage and a ruthless tearing of masks and comforting assumptions. In this quasi-kaleidoscopic pattern, misread by some traditional male critics as loose and disconnected, the different images are held together by firm thematic links and a central, extended metaphor -- the mask in one and the prison in the other. The freshness of the form in both plays is more than matched by the daring freshness and audacity of the content. Indeed, in no other Egyptian play, by a man or a woman, has a writer celebrated with such gusto the female body and its physical appetites and needs, as El-Assal does in these two plays, or dared broach such sensitive, taboo subjects as legitimized rape within marriage, wife battering and the trauma of female genital mutilation and its long-term damaging effect on the future sexual life of the victim. But though the primary objective in both Women without Masks and Women's Prison seems female consciousness-raising and the empowerment of women, the onslaught on male despotism in them is tempered by a sympathetic perception that the forces which have historically bred female oppression -- namely the rise of male-dominated despotic regimes and exploitative economic systems, with the social and cultural structures which support them -- have also oppressed men, rigorously imposing on them roles and images regardless of their dreams and natural inclinations. The oppression of men by such forces becomes the focus of two other plays by El-Assal: Al Bayn Bayn (Betwixt and Between, published in 1989) -- an expressionistic venture with an element of fantasy -- in which an indigent, downtrodden clerk in a factory succumbs to the temptation of promotion and better wages held out by his boss, betrays his nature, principles and girlfriend, and ends up committing suicide; and the much earlier Lam, Alef, Hamzah (the letters which in Arabic spell the word 'No') -- written in 1972 but not published till 2002 -- in which a family dominated by a tyrannical mother who nearly ruins her children's life and cripples her submissive husband, literally consigning him to a wheelchair, becomes a transparent metaphor for the state of Egypt under Nasser's dictatorial regime which is held responsible for the 1967 defeat. In fact, Lam, Alef, Hamzah, or No, would have served as a more appropriate title for El-Assal's most recent play, Al-Kharsaa (The Mute). Published in 2002, and currently on at Al-Ghad theatre in a production directed by the brilliant and rebellious Mohsen Hilmi, in his usual, inventive, vivacious style, and starring singer Azza Balbaa, another political dissenter with strong leftwing sympathies, the play literally bristles with the word La' (No) and frames it at the end as a final rousing cry of protest, shouted by the whole cast at the top of their voices. Why for this production the play was given the unhappy name Min Gheir Kalam (Without Words) instead of the more eloquent original The Mute, or the more fitting No puzzles me. Probably El-Assal did not want the audience to connect her play with a famous old movie starring Samira Ahmed and also called The Mute. But neither did she want to remove the idea of muteness from the title altogether. Here, as in other instances, she had picked a commonplace verbal metaphor from daily speech (the word Ikhras, or Ikhrasi, when addressed to a female, which translates into English as "shut up" but literally means in Arabic "go dumb"), translated it on stage into a concrete, visible image, highlighting its absurdity and grotesque implications, and used it as a central metaphor. She therefore wanted a title that would directly point to this metaphor and came up with the much diluted Without Words as a compromise. The image of a woman who literally goes dumb when ordered by her husband on their wedding night to shut up and never breathe another word could not be resisted and El-Assal has cleverly exploited it here, together with other favourite themes and metaphors, to create a work of great immediacy and topicality. Projected first as an emblem of female oppression, it slowly expands, gaining in political significance and pointing at other forms and victims of oppression, and the process finally reaches a climax when the husband too goes dumb after being brutally coerced by his employers into shutting up and suppressing evidence that would have cleared a poor colleague from a trumped up charge of embezzlement. When the oppression experienced by the wife in the home at the hands of the husband is matched by the oppression he experiences in the public sphere at the hands of his masters, the illusion of male supremacy and power is shattered, revealing a weak, frightened broken down human being, as oppressed and mute as his wife. Using the melodramatic format of the family saga together with some agit- prop techniques, El-Assal strove to give a comprehensive, panoramic view of the most pressing problems and threats facing Egyptian society at the moment. Apart from the usual familial oppression, which continues unabated from one generation to the next, and the resurgence of backward ideas and reactionary values long-thought dead, the list of ailments includes: widespread government and corporate corruption on all levels, widespread unemployment with no foreseeable hope of relief, systematic police brutality, the rise of terrorism and religious fundamentalism, the commercialization of sex and the degradation of the human body, both male and female, and the spread of drugs among young men and of the veil or niqab among young women as escape routes from their sense of impotence and futility and the intolerable pressures of a harsh reality. In quick, short sketches, written and performed in the style of a strip cartoon and interspersed with songs, the play traces the fortunes of three generations of fathers, mothers, sons and daughters, alternating family scenes, which involve whipping and rape, with other scenes of oppression outside the home, which also involve whipping, give hair-raising reports of the torture of political dissenters, display the ruthless persecution and savage intimidation of honest citizens who choose to speak the truth and camouflaged prostitution practiced by jobless female graduates desperate for money. In this kind of structure which works by establishing forceful parallels and contrasts, temporal leaps are accepted by the audience and deep character-studies give way to economic sketches, exaggerated stereotypes and telegraphic dialogue, like the captions in a cartoon. Subtlety would be quite out of place here, given the nature of the work as a passionate, urgent warning with no time to waste on rhetorical niceties or psychological depth. Neither the writer nor director wanted the audience to become emotionally involved and lose themselves in some sort of dramatic illusion; rather, they wanted to demonstrate to them the painful absurdity and unfairness of the reality they take for granted, make them reflect on it and amuse them in the process. Mohsen Hilmi steered clear of realism, staging the show as a series of satirical skits, cunningly juggling the acting between loud, tearful melodrama and farcical caricature, and striving all the time to strike a balance between empathy and detachment. Moments of pathos were summarily undercut with delicious stabs of comedy (in the form of sudden tonal shifts or satirical musical intrusions and sound effects), or else consigned to Balbaa's moving songs, which she performed with a microphone in hand, accompanied by a live band, like a concert singer, thus emphasizing the theatricality of the whole affair. To further define the nature of the show and indicate the mode of reception it required, Hilmi had painter and poet Sa'id El-Faramawi (who also contributed the lyrics) cover all the walls of Al-Ghad hall, including those behind the actors where traditionally a stage drop should have been, with large satirical cartoons and pictures from coloured magazines, mostly dealing with the relation of men and women past and present and the economic factors and inherited gender-roles which direct its course. To further bring the audience into the spirit of the game, create a warmer rapport between stage and auditorium and make the performance into a communal, joint consciousness-raising event, Hilmi placed the audience in the middle of the hall, in comfortable swivel chairs they could move in any direction, with the musical band (led by the show's composer Emad El-Rashidi) playing at their back and the action taking place on three connected stages embracing them on three sides. This seating arrangement kept the audience in close contact with the actors all the time and, with the help of Mohamed Abdel-Mon'im's minimalist set and props, allowed the action to flow smoothly, swiftly from one location to the next with no blackouts for set changes or to mark the lapse of time. Besides, by giving the spectators control of their viewing, the choice of which direction to look, Hilmi made them feel like real collaborators who had an active role in piecing together the images and constructing the meaning of the show. To traditional theatregoers, brought up on the classics and realistic well-made plays, Without Words may seem confusing, sloppily built, verbally crude and politically too direct and overstated. Some may also take issue with its message or find its lambasting of traditional figures of authority and irreverent caricatures of bearded zealots too offensive. No theatre lover, however, can fail to enjoy its overwhelming theatrical vitality, the warm presence and beautiful singing of Azza Balbaa, or the amazing talents of the wonderful cast picked out by Hilmi (Hammam Tammam, Sherif Awwad, Ayman Azzab, Budoor, Walid Fawwaz, Amr Hashim, Wael Badr, Ansari Farid and Mohamed Zakariya), many of whom doubled and trebled in many parts, making the transitions with amazing speed and admirable smoothness and treating us to some vivid and quite exhilarating performances.
