Almost Erased and Almost Discovered: Finding Alifa Rifaat

Almost Erased and Almost Discovered:

Finding Alifa Rifaat

By Sally Al Haq

Accra, May 2021

It was a sweet day in Accra, a few days into a writing residency for which I was selected as one of its African writers-in-residence. I was sitting with the question of what makes a writer “unbecome,” reflecting on my own writing journey and threads of erasure in literature and history. The writing residency was at the Library of Africa and the African Diaspora. They had a wonderful collection of works by African writers, and my curiosity led me to check out their Egypt collection. Unexpectedly, I found a trace of her—this elusive Egyptian writer. I found one of her books, translated into English by Denys Johnson-Davies, in a special African Writers Series published by Heinemann in 1987. I couldn’t believe it: here was Alifa Rifaat, erased in her own country, but celebrated on the African literature scene! I shouted in excitement while telling my dear friend, the Nigerian-British writer and feminist scholar, Amina Mama (b. 1958). Adding to my surprise, Amina said, “Oh Alifa,” as she searched for her favorite story from the collection, “I know Alifa and I have met her in the 80s. God bless her soul.” Then she got irritated remembering what Alifa had gone through. Amina was visiting me after she had relocated to Accra, and I felt a sense of rightness in sharing this moment with someone who had actually met Alifa.

An erased writer wants to be discovered, wants to be read and witnessed. Every literary erasure entails this grief; of what’s been lost and what could have happened if this writer had been met with grace and freedom. Alifa Rifaat (1930–1996) was a highly censored Egyptian writer, almost erased and almost discovered. She influenced the inner worlds of her readers through her observant, captivating writing about everyday life in various Egyptian societies: Cairo, the Delta, and Upper Egypt. She was witty, and something about her writing is iconic in its playfulness; tricking readers, manipulating social rigidities, and building worlds where birds, animals, reptiles, and even djinn can liberate the human characters by challenging them to leave behind the “tangible material world.”

“Alifa” was one of the writer’s pseudonyms, the one she used for most of her published work. The word Alifa, آليفة, has its Arabic roots in domestication, a noun that can be used to refer to a domesticated pet. Yet her writings show that her imagination did not belong to a domesticated being. Alifa as a writer feels familiar and her story as a woman leaves me with too familiar grief—of what women’s lives could have been without the suffocating realities patriarchy has trapped them in.

I took the collection of short stories and a Savanna to my room. I knew that I would finish the book in one session, driven by curiosity of why Alifa Rifaat was censored and has been erased from the collective memory of the literary legacy in Egypt. Why were we denied the opportunity to read her literature? Especially when she seemed to be celebrated on an African and global level after her work was translated by the pioneering literary translator of Arabic short stories, Denys Johnson-Davies?

From the very first story in the collection, “Distant View of a Minaret,” the book’s titular story, I knew she was a brilliant writer, wonderfully capable in her imagination, words, and knowledge, and enthralling at capturing life’s complexities. I knew that she as a woman was deeply daring in articulating sex, sexuality, and pleasure, deeply spiritual in practicing Islam in her prayers and meditations, deeply feminist in her frustration at the social construct of patriarchy, deeply enchanted by the Earth and what grows on it. Her birth name was Fatimah.

Amina Mama met her in London, at one of the Black and Third World International Book Fairs organized by New Beacon Books, around 1984. Thirty-seven years later, I asked Amina so many questions. What was she like? What did she go through? Why did she get censored in Egypt? Did you speak with her? Again, I couldn’t believe it.

The first time I heard about Alifa was through an Ikhtyar publication, in a letter written to her by two young Alexandrian writers in 2020, titled Searching for Queer Desire: A Letter to Alifa Rifaat. I remember I was grateful to Hend and Nadine for introducing Alifa to us, for how much they loved her. I was grateful for the coincidence that led one of them to her books in an old souk for used books. They open their letter to her: “I have been searching for you, for your story, piecing different narratives together. Sometimes I search with a sense of urgency, a scrambling even, as if my life depended on it.” “Hend” and “Nadine” are also pseudonyms. In this string of fictitious names of Egyptian women writers across generations, my heart is filled with grief over what is being taken away from us when we are denied this knowledge, this intellect, and this creativity. Up until this moment, I had only read Alifa through her translator. As I was reading, I wondered what words she used in Arabic for describing Cairo, rural landscapes, sex, lovers, boring husbands, and the emotions of infatuation, ecstasy, stuckness, and frustration.

On February 11, 2023, a friend, a classical Arabic poetry scholar, found her books in the original Arabic at an American university campus where he works. I finally was able to read her in our shared mother tongue. I held three of Alifa’s books in Arabic: the two short story collections, Who Will Be The Man? (1981, من يكون الرجل؟), and The Long Night of Winter, published in 1985, and her last book, a novel, titled The Pharaoh’s Jewel (1991, جوهرة فرعون). In this essay, I refer only to her short stories.

Contextualizing Fatimah’s Erasure 

Fatimah Rifaat’s father, a controlling patriarch, denied her access to studying at university despite her remarkable brilliance as a student and her eagerness to be a writer. She titled the first short story she ever wrote, when she was only nine years old, “The Misery of Our Village,” a poignant image that would continue to be present in her writing. Her refusal of the miserable realities of women’s lives defined her articulation of miserable villages.

Her writing was the beginning of her punishment. She ended up in an arranged marriage, then in another—to a police officer—, and due to domestic and societal pressure, she did not publish her work for almost 14 years. Her husband only allowed her to publish again after serious symptoms of psychosomatic illness.^[1] The price of publishing was high, but she never stopped writing and studying literature and history. Naturally, the journey of motherhood ensued.

This is the simple story you would get from a Google search that would lead to snippets of her life here and there, a couple of academic papers, fan blog posts, Wikipedia, and the Egyptian press, but the story has much more to it.

In “Another Evening at the Club,”^[2] a short story about an arranged marriage of the main character to an inspector of irrigation, she eloquently articulates the state of moving from one patriarchal home to another, which we can see is the author’s lived reality:

“…he bent over her and with both hands gently patted her on the cheeks. It was a gesture she had long become used to, a gesture that promised her continued security, that told her that this man who was her husband and the father of her child had also taken the place of her father who, as though assured that he had found her a suitable substitute, had followed up her marriage with his own funeral. The gesture told her more eloquently than any words that he was the man, she the woman, he the one who carried the responsibilities, made the decisions, she the one whose role it was to be beautiful, happy, carefree. Now, though, for the first time in their life together the gesture came like a slap in the face” (tr. Denys Johnson-Davies).

Reading Alifa Rifaat: May I Serve you Turkish Coffee with a Delight of Death? 

Alifa’s work has two major themes: sex and death. Sex with its pleasures, but also as a stage of performing power, control, and violence. Sometimes, the death of men is an opportunity to unlock freedom for Alifa’s female characters. Published in 1985, “Distant View of a Minaret” (منظر بعيد لمئذنة) is a short story about boredom, desire, sexual frustration, death, and possibly rebirth. In a brief, shocking articulation and choice of scenes and words, the story begins with a married couple having sex. The woman is overwhelmed with shame and frustration at her sexual appetite, while the man seems to be the only one in motion. The woman, too bored, too unengaged, notices a spider web on the ceiling and plans her next day, even observing that her nails need a manicure.

 

“Sometimes she had tried in vain to maintain the rhythmic movements a little longer, but always he would stop her. The last time she had made such an attempt, so desperate was she at this critical moment, that she had dug her fingernails into his back, compelling him to remain inside her. He had given a shout as he pushed her away and slipped from her: ‘Are you mad, woman? Do you want to kill me?’ It was as though he had made an indelible tattoo mark of shame deep inside her, so that whenever she thought of the incident she felt a flush coming to her face.” (tr. Denys Johnson-Davies)

 أرادت عبثا في بعض الأوقات إن ترغمه على الاستمرار في الايقاع. ولكنه كان دائما يوقفها. وفي المرة الأخيرة التي حاولت فيها ذلك، وبكل شدة رغبتها اليائسة  في تلك اللحظة الدقيقة، غرست أظافرها في ظهره تجبره إن يظل داخلها، صرخ وهو يدفعها متملصا منها: “أمجنونة أنت يا امرأة؟ هل تريدين قتلي؟ “. وكما لو انه دق وشما في عمق احساسها من الخزي ، ظلت محاولتها الاخيرة في ذاكرتها لا تنمحي، تحرجها لدرجة أن يحمر وجهها كلما عاودتها الذكرى.

The minaret in her story refers to the mosque of Sultan Hassan; she meditates on what she can see of the panoramic view of old Cairo from her balcony after her daily prayers that are described as “punctuation marks that divided up and gave meaning to her life.” The story that lured the reader in with a sex scene ends with the odor of death in that same bed—the calm, natural death of her husband as he passes in his sleep. The juxtaposition, the contrast Alifa puts the reader through is remarkable: the woman in the story feels troubled having sex with her husband, yet finds herself perfectly calm when she realizes her husband has died. The final scene is of the woman pouring Turkish coffee from a kanaka for herself, the coffee she had prepared for him after she’d washed sex with him off herself.

May I Desire You in the Form of a Snake? A Bird?

Alifa playfully maneuvered the rigidity of her society in her writings, in the portrayal of the multiple flings and affairs of her characters. Some of her main characters desire both women and men. In her masterpiece, “My World of the Unknown”^[3] (عالمي المجهول), the main character, a woman, falls in love with a snake in a playful portrayal of a love affair between two women. It’s love at first sight:

“My gaze was attracted by something twisting and turning along the tip of a branch: bands of yellow and others of red, intermingled with bands of black, were creeping forward. It was a long smooth tube, at its end a small striped head with two bright, wary eyes. The snake curled round on itself in spiral rings, then tautened its body and moved forward. The sight gripped me; I felt terror turning my blood cold and freezing my limbs.” (tr. Denys Johnson-Davies).

وفي أضحية مشمسة، شد انتباهي غصن شجرة قريبة بفروعها المنبثقة في رشاقة رغم جفافها وتشقق قشرها الداكن، وجذب نظري شيء يتلوى على قمة فرع في رشاقة ونعومة. حلقات صفراء وأخرى حمراء تزحف.. تتخللها حلقات سوداء. تكون أنبوبة طويلة ملساء في طرفها رأس صغير منمنم.. له عينان براقتان حذرتان! والتفت الأفعى على نفسها في حلقات لولبية ودوائر متتالية، ثم مطت جسدها متقدمة للأمام. بهرني المنظر، وشعرت بالرعب يلهث دمائي ويثلج أطرافي.

The protagonist has a dream, a vision that leads her to a white house by the banks of the Mansoura canal to make it a home for her family. The house is her “invisible earth,” and its sovereignty captivated her. She, in agony, asks herself: “Could it be that I was in love? But how could I love a snake? Or could she really be one of the daughters of the monarchs of the djinn?”

The snake is portrayed as a fluid creature, its body always curling and shapeshifting, a queer refusal of the static; the author describing its golden tongue like a “twig of arak wood.” Alifa references Cleopatra’s love affair with a serpent, to find a common language for her protagonist’s experience. Alifa allows her protagonist to surrender to the intensity of her new love and to be consumed by the desire to enjoy her lover.

The snake comforts her lover, affirms their togetherness as two women, and tells the protagonist:

“Come without fear or dread, for no creature will reach us in our hidden world, and only the eye of God will see us; He alone will know what we are about and he will watch over us.”^[4]

تعالي.. بغير وجل ولا خوف.. فلن يصل إلينا في عالمنا الخفي مخلوق وإنما عين الله وحدها ترانا.. ويعلم وحده مابنا ويرعانا.

The story continues, and their love persists. It leaves me thinking of snakes and lovers—and aren’t all lovers snakes, both attractive and poisonous?

One would assume that Alifa’s imagery of a lover as a snake is an imagery of danger to the human; but, in reality, she portrays humans as harmful to the spiritual world, the djinn, the snake.

In “My Love That Was” (حبيبي.. الذي كان), a short story published in the collection Who Will Be The Man?, the protagonist narrates her love affair with another man after she moves with her husband to the city of Abu Tig in Asyut in Upper Egypt (which is an even more conservative part of the country). In her fascination with her new lover’s intelligence, eloquence, and beauty, she meets him at the park in the early morning, comforted that no one is there at that hour. She brings him homemade desserts—we know that her lover has a wife and the protagonist is competing for his attention. In their rendezvous, the protagonist finds joy away from what has been causing her heaviness: the death of her parents, problems with her husband, and life in general. In a playful turn, Alifa surprises us by revealing that the lover is a parrot and the protagonist goes to the zoo every day to enjoy his company, watching him and his wife in their cage.

In other formats of playfulness, in Alifa’s short story “The Story” (الحدوتة), the main character, Doria, rejects an arranged marriage. In a central scene, Doria’s body is being depilated with wax to prepare her for her wedding, to make her body clean for her husband. Nabila, a neighbor, knocks on their door as she hears Doria screaming in pain from the waxing. An artist that has rejected the confinement of men and marriage, Nabila goes to Doria’s room and sparks fly between the two women. Mischievously, Nabila tells the mother to cancel the wedding and the story ends with Doria leaving with her. Queerness here feels like flirtatious inevitability.

Rural Landscapes: On Violence

Alifa’s imagination wasn’t that of a Cairene. She lived in Cairo, but at the center of her stories were women from multiple rural locations in the Delta and Upper Egypt. The main characters of her stories are women—incredibly bored women. Patriarchy bores and violates them. Alifa’s brilliance lies in her unique knowledge of Egypt’s rural landscape and its dialects. Her writings challenge the absence of non-Cairene realities in Egypt’s literary memory, specifically through the use of fallahi (rural) dialect in the text.

Her short story “The Honor” (الشرف) tells of another arranged marriage of a daughter. Saffiya, the main character, begs her friend to help her: “Save me, Bahiya! Ismail will be the death of me, he will scoop the inside of me with a handkerchief like one does to an eggplant.”^[5]

In this troubling image, Saffiya refers to a scene where husbands have to prove their wives’ honor by showing a handkerchief soaked in blood after their wedding night. A violent act that used to take place in multiple parts in Egypt, as people commonly believe in the myth of the tearing hymen. Saffiya is distressed because she has already “lost” her virginity to a man she loved and used to secretly meet in the quietness of their village.

The titular story of the collection, “Who Will Be The Man? (من يكون الرجل؟), begins with the protagonist, Zeina, in a state of unbearable pain, both physical and psychological; she has just gone through female genital mutilation. She and her sister were brought to a midwife in the presence of their mother and grandmother. They let Zeina’s sister go as they think the size of her clitoris is unremarkable. Zeina thinks to herself, “The only difference between us is that I am thin and she’s chubby.” She asks “Why would you do this to me if you love me?,” and the midwife responds, “Because men will run after you without you asking, Zeina. And when you’re married and your husband is away, you won’t know the suffering.”^[6]

In “Grapevine” (عناقيد العنب), Alifa continues to write Zeina’s story. We follow her recovery, as she watches birds from her room’s window, inhales the smells of the kind land, and seeks joy in picking some fruit. The story almost feels happy in describing Zeina’s imitation of the birds, wanting to fly and pick fruits off the trees. The joy is overshadowed, however: the family’s male servant who accompanies Zeina during her mornings and lifts her in the air so she can be a bird, turns out to be a pedophile.

In Alifa Rifaat’s rural landscapes, the land is kind, but people aren’t. In her portrayals, the land gives and men take what isn’t theirs.

Against Erasure: Weaving a Writer’s Story

“Genuinely unaware of her own brilliance,” is how Amina Mama described Alifa to me, as well as “humble and quietly reflective.”

Alifa would be the age of my grandmother; her kids are the age of my mother, aunts, and uncles. I often think of how sweet it would have been to grow up reading her fiction, to see through her eyes, and to allow oneself to be touched and changed by her words. An act of literary erasure doesn’t stop with a writer’s death. Alifa Rifaat’s brilliance lies in her sharp observations of the troublingly normalized violence of women’s everyday life. She was censored during her lifetime for not cornering herself in what’s expected of a woman or of a “female” writer.

Writing was her playground. She didn’t write from a place of fear nor shame nor victimhood, while actually writing about fear, shame, and victimhood. She knew that this shame belonged to men and for that they made women suffer. Her portrayals of queerness are enchanting in how they depict women desiring each other without making a big deal out of it. The characters in her short stories are based on social realities that are as relevant in today’s Egyptian society as they were when Alifa wrote them.

For the last four years, I have read, reflected on, spoken about, and taught Alifa Rifaat’s short stories, witnessing and teaching her as an act of responsibility, to work against the erasure of one of Egypt’s most brilliant writers. I hope her stories will continue to be discovered and read as she wished for them to be.

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^[1] Olive, Barbara A. “Writing Women’s Bodies: A Study of Alifa Rifaat’s Short Fiction”. International Fiction Review 23/1-2 (1996).

^[2] Rifaat, Alifa. Johnson-Davies, Denys, translator & editor. Homecoming: Sixty Years of Egyptian Short Stories. American University in Cairo Press, 2014.

^[3] Alifa Rifaat, Who Will Be The Man?, Short Story Collection, National Center for Arts and Letters, 1981. أليفة رفعت، من يكون الرجل؟، المركز القومي للفنون والآداب، 1981

^[4] Translated by Denys Johnson-Davies, 1987.

^[5] Translated by the author, “الحقيني يا بهية حايموتني الواد سماعين. هايقورني بمنديلة كما البدنجان”

^[6] Translated by the author, “عشان الرجالة يا زينة يجروا وراكي ولا أنت سائلة ولما تتجوزي، لو جوازك غاب ما تعرفي العذاب”

Sally Al Haq is a writer, feminist, and educator based in Cairo. She co-leads the Liberatory Archives and Memory program at Whose Knowledge?  She co-founded Ikhtyar African Feminist Collective (2013–2022) where she worked on localizing feminist narratives in Arabic. Sally has published on various platforms, including The Markaz Review and Mada Masr.