I SAy my WordS out Loud

I Say
My Words
Out Loud
Ahmed Fouad Negm
Prince Claus Fund
Contents
Poems
Poems translated by Mona Anis
My Country First
Mother Egypt
This is My Handwriting
Light a Candle
Pablo Neruda
Your Wondrous Sea, Oh Alexandria
Message Number 1 from Tura Prison
The Prison Ward
The Consolations of Poetry
Alone
4
8
12
14
18
24
28
32
38
42
Essays
Ahmed Fouad Negm:
‘Speaking Truth to Power’
by Hala Halim 44
Exploding into the Seventies:
Ahmed Fouad Negm, Sheikh Imam,
and the Aesthetics of a New
Youth Politics
by Marilyn Booth
54
Acknowledgements
79
5
9
13
15
19
25
29
33
39
43
MY COUNTRY FIRST (1967)
My country first,
My country second,
My country third.
My country first,
I’m improvising before singing my mawwal.1
My country second,
I say my words out loud.
My country third,
It’s my treasure, my wealth, and my pride.
My country first,
I’m improvising before singing my mawwal
According to what has been prescribed.
My country second,
I say my words out loud
And without any punning.
My country third,
It’s my treasure, my wealth, and my pride,
And it’s esteemed by all.
My country first,
I’m improvising before singing my mawwal
According to what has been prescribed for the sick.
My country second,
I say my words out loud,
Without punning and to the bull’s eye.
4
5
My country third,
It’s my treasure, my wealth, and my pride.
It’s esteemed by all, and it’s time,
My country, that you drew a line
Between truth and lies,
Time you raised your banner high,
A proof of your strength.
My country first,
My country second,
My country third.
6
1
Mawwal, is a traditional form of vocal music that
is usually presented before the actual song begins
7
MOTHER EGYPT (1969)
Let our words be preceded by our greetings to all who are listening,
Little sparrow chirping rhymed words full of meaning
About a dark land, a moon,
A river, a boat and a shore,
And fellow travellers on a hard journey
And an image of a huge gathering
And processions
Reflected in the eyes of a beautiful young woman,
Who is the reason for my words and meanings.
Beautiful Mother Egypt
Wearing a tarha and a long robe,
Time’s grown old, and you’re still young,
It’s now departing, and you’re still coming,
Coming after a hundred and one nights,
Treading on hardship,
Smiling as always,
As strong as ever.
When you laugh, morning appears
After dark and dusk,
And the sun rises above you,
A young, playful and beautiful woman.
Islands of night
Are swept by the sea,
And dawn’s a high torch
Undrowned by the waves,
And the shore is looming
Near sunlit cities.
Come, give us a hand,
Help us;
No matter how rough the waves may be,
Together, with resolution
And perseverance,
We will make the crossing.
8
9
Mother Egypt, you’re like a ship;
No matter how rough the sea may be,
Your peasants are your sailors;
They will harness the winds.
The helmsman is a worker
And the oarsman, an Arab knight,
And the one up on the mast
Can see all that has passed
And all that is to come.
Two knots, and a third for luck,
You ride on the crest of a strong wave
To reach the shore safely,
Young, playful and beautiful.
And our sweet words carried by our greetings
Hover above the gathering once more,
Like a sparrow singing its merriment,
Dropping songs as if they were seeds
Kissing the land which receives them with joy.
They blossom,
They grow,
Become songs again,
Singing:
He who built Egypt
Was a sweet maker.
10
11
THIS IS MY HANDWRITING (1970)
This is my handwriting,
And these are my words.
Cover the paper with tears,
Oh my eyes,
For the olive groves are mine,
And this land is an Arab land.
Its breeze is my breath,
And its dust is of my people,
And it would not forget me
If I tried to forget.
This is my handwriting,
And these are my words.
I shall write, Oh my eyes,
You are forbidden sleep.
And I shall dim my eyesight with tears all day,
Until I pay my debt
That is as sacred
As prayer and fasting.
For debt to the free man
Is bitter agony, disgrace,
And worries towing hidden grief.
This is my handwriting,
And these are my words.
I shall write on my hand,
With my blood as ink,
Oh my resolve, don’t fail me,
Oh my people, do join in.
And when we fulfill our promise
We shall rejoice in the names
Of those who died young
In shelled houses and schools,
And those workers buried
Under the factory’s rubble.
This is my handwriting,
And these are my words.
12
13
LIGHT A CANDLE (1970)
Light a candle, loved ones,
Lead my steps.
Two eyelashes
Are bidding me follow:
One course leads to blame,
The other to regret;
Two courses, each one risky,
Tell me, people, where to go,
Light a candle,
Lead my steps.
Two piercing eyelashes
On magical eyes.
They raise my heartbeat,
Promising me love;
Promises like raw fruit
Growing on the other bank,
Flirting with me,
Calling to me
From afar, saying I am yours.
I wish I could,
I want to cross,
But premonitions slow me down.
One course leads to blame,
The other to regret;
Two courses, each one risky,
Tell me, people, where to go,
Light a candle,
Lead my steps.
Light a candle, young maids,
Lead my steps, allay my fears.
A sea separates me from my love
With waves like my premonitions,
Each wave carrying its own load:
A night’s dream,
14
15
A night’s worry.
Count the waves of the sea, you
Who have seen me,
And tell my loved one
I wish I could,
I want to cross,
But premonitions slow me down.
One course leads to blame,
The other to regret;
Two courses, each one risky,
Tell me, people, where to go,
Light a candle,
Lead my steps.
Why, my heart, has love crossed our path?
Why be blamed by those not in love?
Love has come, bringing anguish,
Disturbing our sleep at night.
From dusk to dawn
We are awake when others sleep.
Wounds are our destiny,
But one day the wounded shall be cured.
Oh my heart, all this anguish?
Calm yourself and follow reason:
One course leads to blame,
The other to regret;
Two courses, each one risky,
Tell me, people, where to go,
Light a candle,
Lead my steps.
16
17
PABLO NERUDA (1973)
Shoulder your gun
And consign your promises
And excuses
To the dustbin.
They massacred the roses
On the cheeks of the girls
And the greenery
In their hearts.
There can be no peace,
Oh fabricators of the age of prosperity,
With the ogres all around.
Wounds are still fresh;
They,
History,
And memories
Have not been forgotten:
Imam Hussein,
Spartacus,
Allende,
Lorca,
Abdel-Rehim,1
A peasant from our country
Who was burnt before Doomsday
In the hell of betrayed Sinai,
Constantly betrayed.
Ernesto Guevara
The great,
Khamis and Baqari,2
Shafie,3
Adham4
With his old mawwal,
And Qotb, the pivot of religion himself,5
Punished for reciting the Qur’an.
A garnet necklace, beaded with martyrs
From the time of Socrates.
18
19
Today, a diamond has been added:
Neruda, the morning piper,
The pipe of the breeze.
In the morning beautiful Santiago
Drinks milk from your songs.
Scared, the sparrows
Scattered
When the owl cried
The portents of your death.
You, a martyr,
Whose presence fills the space,
A surgeon visiting the wounded,
Examining their wounds.
They rise,
Reach for their guns,
And with all the might of the afflicted
They stab at what has plagued them,
Putting an end to the plague.
The sun rises in the morning,
Bidding good morning
To all those
Carrying guns and wounds in one hand
And flutes in the other.
And the sun rises in the morning
Above every palace
And every wilderness,
And the sun falls
At dusk
As Pablo Neruda is martyred.
Oh earth,
Mother of boys,
Rotating, counting the years.
Oh earth,
Mother of girls,
Rotating, counting the past:
20
21
Hardships,
Wars,
Peoples’ ordeals,
Dogs,
Agony,
Fog,
Sunsets,
Lightning,
Thunder,
Sunrise,
Uprisings,
Struggles,
Just duels,
Unjust ones.
And justice was
And remains
At all times
The cause
And the gamble.
And the land will always remain
A stage for the knights in the arena:
Imam Hussein,
Spartacus,
Guevara,
Lorca,
Abdel-Rehim,
Neruda, the morning piper,
Neruda,
The pipe of the breeze.
1 an Egyptian soldier killed in the Arab-Israeli 1967 War
2 two workers hanged in Egypt in 1952
3 leader of the Sudanese Communist Party hanged in 1971
4 an Arab folk hero who sided with the poor
5Muslim Brotherhood leader Sayed Qotb hanged in 1966
22
23
YOUR WONDROUS SEA, OH ALEXANDRIA (1976)
Oh Alexandria,
Grant me some of your love,
Let your wondrous sea
Toss me from the arms of one wave to another
While it’s rough and the fishing is plenty.
Let me wash my clothes and hang up my worries,
With the sun rising above me and me rising with it,
As if I were a peasant in Urabi’s army1
Who died guarding the fortress
And was swept away by your sea;
As if I were a breeze atop the hills
Coming from the sea to drown in your magic;
As if I were words from the mind of Beiram,2
A song straight from Sayed’s heart;3
As if I were a student who
In the heart of a demonstration
Chanting your name died rejoicing.
As if I were the voice of Nadim by night4
Waking up your people
To help you back onto your feet;
As if I were a brick in a house in an alleyway;
As if I were a tear in a sleepless eye;
As if I were a star over the lighthouse
Guiding wanderers
When there is no moon.
Oh Alexandria, you who are Egyptian,
Your smile heralding laughter,
The sea is a window made of lattice work,
And you are a princess watching the world go by.
Oh Alexandria, I am in love,
I want to rest in your embrace,
My tender words a dowry
For intimate talk between us.
Oh Alexandria, you
Where the poor spend sleepless nights
24
25
In search of bread,
Where morning comes, and night returns,
And the poor suffer without respite.
Pity those worn out by time,
All their efforts unrewarded;
Their nets have been cast on a rough sea
But have come out empty.
Oh Alexandria, there are wolves among your people
And beasts above the people.
And there are also passionate lovers
Who will not betray you in treacherous times.
And among your people
There is an olive-skinned woman
Before whom I stand defenceless,
Compelled to sing,
Each time I see her.
1Ahmed Urabi, commander of the Egyptian army at the time
of the British bombardment of Alexandria in 1882
2Poet Beiram al-Tounsi (Bayram al-Tunisi)
3 Alexandrian composer Sayed Darwish
4Abdullah al-Nadim, an Alexandrian writer and nationalist leader
at the time of the British occupation of Egypt
26
27
MESSAGE NUMBER 1 FROM TURA PRISON (1977)
With every harbinger
Of January’s arrival
Light enters the prison cells,
Driving away fear
And darkness.
Go prison breeze,
Give your greetings to the trees,
For the blossoms are flowering
And the doves are nesting in the cells.
My voice comes
From the silence of the prison.
It’s my heartbeat,
Pulsing from the coffin,
Addressing you, my loved one,
Asking you to convey my words
From deep inside the whale.
Give my love, sweetheart,
To all those I love.
Give each a share
Of my greetings.
Embrace the world
With your eyes,
And send me
That look of yours,
So I can see those I love
And quench my heart’s thirst.
And ask
All the learned men in our country,
Ask every tower and every minaret,
Ask every friend,
And every child,
If any of them had seen
The signs of resurrection
Before the good tidings
Of 18 January1
28
29
When Egypt rose up,
Cursing hunger, humiliation,
Injustice and its rulers,
After it had been believed
To have been dead.
Give my love
To the dark-skinned boys
In the alleyways.
Give my love to
The girls, promised from birth
To concubines’ beds.
And ask
Each reader of the book
With a reproach,
Whether they would have believed,
With all the ignorance
And the deaths,
That the instincts of the people
Would precede any voice?
This is great Egypt,
My love,
This is Egypt,
For whose sake you preferred
Our humble nest
Over all the palaces.
This is Egypt, Azza.
30
1There was a popular uprising in Egypt dubbed the Bread Riots on 18 January 1977,
during which the poet was arrested for a few months
31
THE PRISON WARD (1978)
Prison ward, listen in:
I’ve shaken the dice many times,
And gambled with everything on the big prize and lost,
And bitter though prison is,
I’ve never once wanted to repent.
Having bid the night guards good evening,
Every single one of them,
The bringi
The kingi
And the shingi,1
I say we’re wicked inmates all,
Though the storeroom clerk
Has given us different uniforms.
My first words are for the Prophet;
My second, for Job;
The third are for my estrangement;
The fourth, for my destiny;
My fifth, I will say that he who oppresses others
Will himself be defeated one day.
First, hail to the Prophet who freed mankind,
Cured the afflicted, and rescued the poor;
You honoured man above the animals,
Raised the sword of righteousness high above oppression,
And declared to your people
If one day injustice should prevail,
And right be trodden down,
No rain will there be, no greenery, no civilisation,
Just snakes and crows
Wreaking havoc on the mountains and valleys,
No moon or light in the skies,
Only blindness, sorrow,
And fear of the jailer’s cruelty;
Thus, people become scared of each other,
And they scare the Sultan.
32
33
Second, I say I’m Job;
When Job was afflicted
And suffered for a couple of days,
Stories were told about him, and he was given two names,
Called both a prophet and a saint.
But what about me, here in prison, twice patient?
Patient after I was kidnapped from my people,
And patient with what has been dealt out to me?
The rascals rule, and their reign is one of shame.
It’s the law of animals over people.
I swear by the grave of the Prophet
That one day the scales of justice will be twice upheld,
And I shall be satisfied, seeing justice twice applied.
Third, my estrangement in a world of rascals,
Where they are protected,
And free people are endangered.
When the mean climb, they hire sycophants,
Thugs, crooks, thieves, hypocrites,
(Praise be to the Prophet);
Naked tarts dance vigorously for no reason,
Strangling words,
Drowning out the sound of music
And the poetry in the mawwal,
Smothering the meaning of songs
And the ringing of bells.
One, the One and the Only;
Two, the grandfather of Hussein;2
Three, it’s ugly to gloat;
Four, the ink of the press;
Five, my strong resolve;
Six, the coming tomorrow;
Seven, my heart in love;
Eight, the longing of my fellow inmates;
Nine, the wide world;
Ten, damnation to all the traitors.
Let it be known by all
34
35
That prisons are only walls,
That ideas are like light,
That light can jump over a thousand walls,
And that walls never hold back the spirit.
And let it be known by all
That injustice has grown old,
That the gates of the prison are weak,
That the handles of the gates have disappeared,
And that soon all this will just be memories,
And that these promises will be fulfilled tomorrow,
And that all your days, and ours, will be filled with light.
36
1 Turkish military ranks given to the guards, meaning first, second and third
2 Prophet Muhammad is the grandfather of Imam Hussein
37
THE CONSOLATIONS OF POETRY (1979)
How consoling poetry
And singing are
At times of hardship.
How consoling words and love are
In troubled times.
We have wandered far from each other,
And we were dispersed,
Now we are together,
In prison.
Oh comrades,
What maze is it
When the moon is strangled by long nights,
When friends tread in darkness,
Stumbling over friends,
And when a two-step road
Takes a whole year to tread.
Look where we are today
And how many of us there are.
How many will there be tomorrow,
And where we will be after tomorrow?
What is our situation now,
And what will happen to us the morning after?
Where have we been,
And where did we end?
We visit a new place every day,
And our number increases every day.
We open doors every day,
And every day we remove obstacles.
A building goes up every day,
And every day another comes down.
Every day we are pregnant with new songs,
And every day we give birth to new hopes.
Whether we are inside a prison,
Or outside a prison,
This is how we should be.
38
39
How consoling poetry
And singing are
At times of hardship.
How consoling a green branch is
Amid desolation.
We have wandered far from each other,
But now we’re together,
Writing the first words of our book:
Damned be he who bows down
Before oppression
By a cowardly ruler;
Damned be the word
That bends in the throat
Or escapes before it’s uttered;
Damned be an hour of one’s life
That’s consumed by subjugation;
Damned be bread eaten with humiliation;
Damned be the cowards.
Oh comrades,
You who taught the stones strength,
I am calling out against
Monotony,
Depression,
And boredom.
You who can speed up the light of dawn
And its advent,
Listen attentively
To a singer’s cry
Emanating from the bottom of nothingness:
Unite,
Unite.
40
41
ALONE (1987)
You’re alone,
And I’m alone,
Crying for hours
Over the long journey
And darkness.
Oh, how lonely I am,
Alone.
It’s a desert, and I’m a camel man,
Alone.
There’s a heavy load, and I’m the carrier,
Alone.
And there’s a story I have to narrate,
Alone.
Oh, it’s lonely being alone.
And you, the whisper of the breeze,
The touch of music’s strings;
You, with winter cheeks,
And eyes like rivers.
You spend autumn
Between fire and nostalgia,
Colouring dreams,
And making the blossoms open.
As for me, my autumn is fruitless,
Spent alone
Between thirst and fasting;
Alone,
Unable to sleep,
Or spend the night awake,
Alone.
42
43
Ahmed Fouad Negm:
‘Speaking Truth to Power’
by Hala Halim
44
45
That the poetry of Ahmed Fouad Negm (b. 1929) resonated in the 2011
Revolution in Egypt and in subsequent protests is hardly unexpected. It is
a testament to a magnificent corpus that speaks directly to the causes codified
in the revolution’s slogan, “bread, freedom, and social justice”. Negm’s corpus
belongs to a canon of modern Egyptian poetry composed in the colloquial
rather than the classical language, often deriving its forms from dexterously
reworked folk traditions, and committed to the themes of social equality
and political justice. Over and above the accessibility of his poems’ register
and the fact of many of them having been set to music, his poetry is secured
in Arab memory by virtue of its association with movements of protest
and with historical junctures in Egypt and the Arab world for more than
half a century.
“Al-Fagumi”: Negm glosses his epithet for himself that serves as the
title of his memoir as “impulsively outspoken”. The folktale with which he
illustrates the archetypal fagumi – an indigent scholar-sheikh at the Azhar
University who refuses to bow to the conquering sultan seeking to turn
the religious establishment into his mouthpiece and rejects the sovereign’s
gift – is a precise illustration of Edward Said’s adage about the intellectual’s
role as “speaking truth to power”.1 Negm has always been firmly situated
within the populist left. Having joined forces in 1962 with Sheikh Imam ‘Isa
(1918–1995), the singer, composer and lute-player who set his poems to
music, the duo’s performances – whether live or, more often, in view of the
state’s clampdown on them, recorded non-commercially on cassette tapes –
were the main channel through which the lyrics reached a wide audience.
Imprisoned under Presidents Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat, Negm’s
formation was eclectic. This “ambassador of the poor” and the oppressed
acquired his politicisation through direct exposure to injustice in rural and
then underprivileged urban contexts, activism and mixing with leftist milieus.2
Spending his childhood on the family estate in the hamlet of al-‘Abbasa
in Sharqiyya province where he received traditional Qur’anic schooling,
Negm lost his father, a police officer, at the age of six. The family fell on
hard times and Negm lived for nine years in an orphanage, after which he
returned to the village and worked the land for some years. What is striking
about his glowing recollections of this formative period is the formidable
repertoire of oral traditions it put at his disposal: his unlettered, eloquent
mother’s songs and proverbs – “the heritage of fools whom I believe Christ,
peace be upon him, called ‘the salt of the earth’”, as he puts it – the village
lore and the mawawil (folk ballads; singular mawwal).3 The years that followed,
from the mid-1940s until the early 1960s, saw Negm move between Cairo
and the Suez Canal zone, then back to the capital where he settled definitively.
Those were the years of Negm’s incipient initiation into political activism:
his participation in strikes against the British in whose military bases he was
employed led to his first encounter with the left when a communist lent
him Maxim Gorky’s Mother. A three-year stint in prison was a turning point:
it put him in closer contact with leftist intellectuals who were fellow-inmates;
he reconsidered his cultural affiliations; and wrote his first collection of
poems which, thanks to the prison authorities’ personal encouragement,
won a state-sponsored first book manuscript competition on the eve of his
release. In hindsight, Negm asserts that he “discovered [in himself in prison]
the poet whose name was to be on everyone’s lips from the Gulf to the
Ocean and in any town or village on earth where Arabic is spoken”.4
Years after his first collection was published, Negm was to dedicate his
1998 diwan of “Complete Works” (a curious title given his in-flux corpus)
“to Ahmad bin ‘Arus, ‘Abdallah al-Nadim and Mahmud Bayram al-Tunisi…
immortal poets of the people”.5 Superimposed here, over his childhood’s
folklore and colloquial songs, is a genealogy of Egyptian poets who composed
in the spoken language and with whom his own poetry was to enter into
dialogue increasingly since the first collection. Negm attributes to that first
period in prison his “awakening” to an earlier poetic and musical corpus
that he, who had acquired a preference for Egyptian cultural production
that “bore a whiff of Europe”, used to shun as “folksy” (“baladi”).6 True, it
was while incarcerated that he first became acquainted with the colloquial
poetry of his Marxist contemporary Fu’ad Haddad (1927–1985), and that
he harked back to the colloquial poetry of Mahmud Bayram al-Tunisi
(1893–1961), the anti-colonial writer whose texts evince deep concern
with social issues. But Negm’s staking a claim to colloquial poetic forebears
who were part of the nationalist movement, such as ‘Abdallah al-Nadim
(1845[?]–1896) – journalist, writer and orator of the 1882 ‘Urabi uprising –
and al-Tunisi, also had much to do with the socio-political and cultural
currents of his own time.
In the 1960s, that decade of socialism, pan-Arabism and anti-imperialism,
when Negm had a clerical job in the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity
Organization, he moved in the circles of journalists, artists and intellectuals
whom he credits with greater exposure to cultural debates and trends.7
The Arabic term for colloquial poetry “was coined in 1961 by a group
ˉ rus’ [whose name
of young poets… The group named itself ‘Jamˉa‘it Ibn ‘A
appears in Negm’s dedication cited above], after the Egyptian poet…
(b. 1780) who wrote in colloquial Arabic… In coining the term… the new
colloquial poets were putting an end to the centuries-old Arabic tradition
of restricting the term shi‘r to poetry written in the canonical literary
language,” as Noha Radwan has argued.8 It was a trend that was concurrent
and shared affinities with the experimentation, not least on the level of
diction, in “modernist Arabic poetry” written in the classical language.9
If Negm found sanction and enrichment in this trend and some of its
46
47
practitioners, he continued, simultaneously, to dialogue with both the pre1950s colloquial poetry and the oral traditions of his childhood. Increasingly
sought after by the Cairene milieu of literati in the ‘60s, Negm was to
find himself – gradually, and more so towards the end of that decade –
disenchanted with the Nasser regime, in particular with the gap between
its professed socialism and the reality of persistent social inequality,
as reflected in his poems.10
It would be misleading to suggest that Negm’s corpus is entirely inscribed
within committed poetry; his poems also treated private themes, albeit
later often interwoven with collective concerns. The 1973 poem ‘Nawwara’
– named for his infant daughter, now an esteemed activist and journalist –
opens with invocations of blessing for the child and for the Egypt of her
future, followed by tenderly humorous tableaus of the infant, then a medi­­­
tation on how her generation would regard his generation’s struggle, closing
with his own unvanquished optimism.The beloved, at times a specific woman
as in the 1977 ‘Ughniyya Hizar’ (‘Playful Song’), is at other times Egypt, and
at yet other times both. ‘Baladi wa Habibati’ (‘My Homeland and My Beloved’;
written in prison in 1972) opens with a deeply nostalgic address to the beloved,
reminiscent of the amatory prelude in classical Arabic poetry, before the
speaker is rudely awakened from his dream by a police search campaign.
When “one of the layabouts / looked me in the eye” in hopes of “spotting
the slightest trace of fear / […] and which of us is the coward / which the
traitor”, he trembles and sputters gibberish when the speaker returns his
gaze: “because he saw two beautiful images / in my kindly eyes / Egypt in
the left eye / and you in the right”.11 Negm’s ‘Bahiyya’, arguably one of his
most well-known poems, was repeatedly recalled since the beginning of the
2011 Revolution. In appealing to Bahiyya (the name also signifying beautiful
or radiant), the trope of a feminised Egypt, Egypt as the peasant woman
addressed here as “mother”, the poem extols her youth, vitality and for­­­
bearance that will shine through when the night has given way to a new
dawn. Written in prison in 1969, two years after the defeat in the June 1967
War with Israel, the poem then depicts Mother Egypt as a ship on a stormtossed sea, steered by its peasant-sailors over mighty waves to the safe
haven. The lyric, as set to music and sung by Sheikh Imam, was to reach a
wider audience through the film by Youssef Chahine (1926-2008), al-‘Usfur
(The Sparrow, 1972), which thematises the conditions that led to the defeat.
Sung at the opening of the film, stanzas of the lyric are voiced over again
at the close after Bahiyya, the woman protagonist whose household is the
meeting place of diverse characters, rushes out into the street right after
Nasser’s speech announcing the defeat, shouting, “No, we will fight.”12
The 1967 War launched Negm into committed writing, his first response
to the defeat, ‘Risala’ (‘Letter’), having been written on 8 June as the first
news of what had actually taken place was barely breaking. Written in the
locutions and accent of an Upper Egyptian, the poem is a message from
a father, Hasan Muharib (his surname also denoting fighter) who works as a
guard in a village, to his son fighting on the border. Bearing tender greetings
and messages from kith and kin, and news of relatives’ volunteer work in
the war effort, the father’s letter strengthens his son’s resolve to fight, calling
on him to avenge his brother who was martyred. While the pathos of the
poem enhances the bitterness of the reader, privy to what has transpired in
the war, Negm’s choice not to alter it, save for a few words, was undoubtedly
intended to motivate resistance. By contrast, ‘Baqarit Haha’ (‘Haha’s Cow’),
a poem written in the wake of the defeat, is a poignant lamentation of
what has befallen the country, represented here as a “dark butting cow”
(reminiscent, one is tempted to suggest, of the goddess Hathor) full of
bounty and fertility. The lament squarely lays the blame on the authorities
for the defeat: the cow’s abundance is plundered by the people of the
household and when the day comes when “foreigners” break in and steal
its milk, “the guards escape” while the people of the house are fast asleep,
heedless of the creature’s crushed calls. The power of the poem derives from
its simple diction and elemental imagery, and the bullet-like short verses,
punctuated by the refrain of a single two-syllable word, “Haha”.The lyric thus
lent itself to a call-and-response format in public performances by Sheikh
Imam.13 This was one of the poems that constituted the “red line” in public
performances that the authorities, post-1967, allowed Negm and Sheikh
Imam to hold in the belief that “containment within the regime’s official
media would guarantee their moderation” – except that the duo “crossed
that line”.14
I would note that Negm adapted some of the poem’s elements from
a folk song that begins with “Uha, Haha’s cow” that he overheard the
village children singing as he was being taken to the orphanage many years
earlier.15 In the course of discussing Negm’s poetics, Kamal Abdel-Malek
dwells on his use of “folkloric forms” in the service of his “identification
with the causes” of the people, such as the mawwal, children’s songs, riddles
(in this case lampooning public figures and establishment intellectuals and
artists), wedding songs, cries of peddlers, proverbs, and the “subu‘ songs”
chanted at the traditional celebration held on the seventh day after a child
is born.16 Indeed, Negm’s poem ‘Sabah al-Khayr’ (‘Good Morning’) appro­­­
priates imagery, such as “the sprinkling of salt”, from the subu‘ ceremony
to greet and welcome secondary school pupils arrested in protests and
brought to the Citadel Prison where he himself was incarcerated in 1973.
The “zaffa (procession) here… is not the communal act of celebrating the
newborn and of striving to ward off the invisible evil spirits. Rather it is the
revolutionary zaffa of the newly born participants in the national struggle
48
49
against visible and evil oppressors.”17 The opening verses – “Good morning
to the flowers that have blossomed / in the gardens of Egypt” – it should
be added, echoed in the 2011 Revolution after they were used as a headline
for a newspaper spread, while the events were unfolding, on the young martyrs
of the protests against the Mubarak regime. Subsequently reproduced on
placards and banners, the verses allusively underscored this revolution’s
continuity with earlier revolts against authoritarianism and corruption,
via Negm’s poetry.18
Negm and Sheikh Imam were to become involved in protests, mainly
by university students, who appealed to the duo and with whom they were
in solidarity. The protests took place first, under Nasser, demanding an
investigation into the causes of the defeat in 1967, and then under Sadat in
1972 – on different university campuses but also involving a sit-in in Tahrir
Square which Negm joined – primarily in response to the president’s
repeated deferral of action to liberate the Egyptian territories occupied by
Israel in 1967. Other demonstrations, and not only by students, would take
place after the 1973 War, protesting against the regime’s rapprochement
with the West and the government’s decision to cut subsidies on basic
foodstuffs.19 Perceived by the authorities as the poet who “disrupts public
peace”, Negm’s repeated imprisonment would inspire several poems; in
addition to recording the date of composition of these texts, per his usual
practice, he would also add the name of the prison.20 His 1972 poem
‘Waraqa min Malaff al-Qadiyya’ (‘A Page from the Dossier of the Court
Case’) mimics the interrogation format in a dramatised counter-document
that puts his positions (concerning the veering away from socialism, the
stalling on war, the students’ movement) on public record and questions
the state’s claim to representing the people: “-First, may I ask who I’m talking
to? / -The State Security Prosecutor / -Whose state? / -The State of Egypt /
-Egypt the shack / or Egypt the palace?”21 With the suspect repeatedly
outwitting him, the interrogator, at the close of the poem, avers that a good
beating will change his mind. The poem’s ending, rather than indicate that
“[a]ny victory that could have been gained by the preceding witty repartee
is thus lost”, underscores that the authoritarian state can wield nothing
more than brute force in the face of legitimate demands and protest.22
Negm’s criticism of Sadat’s Open Door Policy and rapprochement with
the West was effected in his poems by resorting to a whole gamut of satirical
exploits. The 1976 ‘Bayan Hamm’ (‘An Important Announcement’) is a
devastating parody of a broadcast of a speech by Sadat; the 1974 ‘Mawwal
al-Ful wa’l-Lahma’ (‘Mawwal of Fava Beans and Meat’) mocks an announce­­­
ment by “a so-called responsible source” extolling the virtues of eating
fava beans over the potentially venomous results of consuming meat; and
‘Boutikat’ (‘Boutiques’), written while Negm was in prison at the end of the
Sadat period in 1981, adapts idioms from the folk lingo of magic and the
vernacular calls of souk hawkers to send up the advertising hype surrounding
the consumerism at the expense of “the poor and their problems”.23 One
of his most celebrated poems of the period is ‘Nixon’, written in 1974 on
the occasion of the American president’s visit to the country. The poem
mockingly derives its diction and imagery from phrases of excessive welcome
and celebratory occasions in a mordant critique of Sadat and other Arab
rulers playing their countries into the hands of American policy. In “what
came to be known as ‘the Nixon Baba Case’”, Negm was arrested, together
with Sheikh Imam, and a motley group of guests who were spending the
evening at their place (the latter soon released). At the interrogation by the
state security prosecutor, Negm reiterated his opposition to Nixon’s visit
“while the blood of our sons spilled in the [1973] October War specifically
by Nixon’s bullets has not yet dried” and his disapproval of certain journalists’
cheering for American aid.24
In a memorable scene in her first novel, In The Eye of the Sun, Ahdaf
Soueif has her protagonist Asya grapple with explicating the complexities
of ‘Nixon’ while translating it to a roomful of people at a social gathering
in England as they listen to a smuggled tape recording of Sheikh Imam
performing it. When “the Sheikh’s harsh, rasping voice comes on: ‘Sharraft
ya Nixon Baba, / Ya bta‘ el-Watergate’,” Asya explains that, “he says, ‘You’ve
honoured us, Nixon Baba – ‘Baba’ means ‘father’ but it’s also used, as it is
used here, as a title of mock respect – as in ‘Ali Baba’, for example… you
could also address a child as ‘Baba’ as an endearment – a sort of inversion:
like calling him Big Chief because he’s so little – and so when it’s used
aggressively… it carries a diminutivising, belittling signification.” Of the second
verse, she adds that “the structure ‘bita‘ el-whatever’ (el- is just the definite
article…) posits a close but not necessarily defined relationship between”
two nouns. Hence, she continues, “‘bita‘ el-vegetables’… would be someone
who sold vegetables… So Nixon is ‘Bita‘ el-Watergate’, which suggests him
selling the idea of Watergate to someone – selling his version of Watergate
to the public – and pursuing a Watergate type of policy, but all in a very
non-pompous, street vernacular, jokingly abusive kind of way.”25
But Negm’s poems on socio-political themes are far from exclusively
dedicated to Egyptian issues: his pan-Arabism, opposition to colonialism
and neo-colonialism, and commitment to socialist struggles elsewhere are
woven into his poetry. Palestine is at the centre of his pan-Arab orientation:
‘Ya Filisitinyya’ (‘O Palestinian’), written two years after the 1967 War,
strengthens Palestinians’ resolve to resist and spells hope that they will
overcome, while ‘Mawwal Filistini Masri’ (‘A Palestinian-Egyptian Mawwal’)
resounds with Palestinian mourning and yearning for an Egypt that is the
cure. ‘Saigon’ is a joyful lyric that celebrates the liberation of that city
– “a pearl, revolutionaries” – and the triumph over American imperialism
in the Vietnam War.26 Three separate poems can be considered a triptych on
icons of the left that bespeaks Negm’s internationalism: while ‘Allende’ is an
elegy for “Salvador, the kind-hearted” who misread the signs, both ‘Ho Chi
Minh’ and ‘Sarkhit Guevara’ (‘Guevara’s Scream’) eulogise the principles
that the two figures stood for.27 Thus, the speaker in ‘Ho Chi Minh’ urges
one Ragab to witness the story of “heroism” and proceeds to extol the
dead “ruler” who became “an ascetic” and “renounced power”, a “Christ”
whose legacy constitutes signs that provide sound guidance to be followed
unswervingly.28 In the second poem, Guevara “the ideal freedom fighter is
dead”, the speaker proceeding to taunt phony, dandy “latter-day freedom
fighters / on the houseboats” with the manner of his death that “embodies
his struggle”. But the speaker then exhorts workers, “the deprived” and all
those who are “shackled” to heed “Guevara’s scream” for “there is no
alternative” in “any homeland, any place” but to “prepare an army for
salvation”.29
In the years leading up to Egypt’s 2011 Revolution, Negm recited his
poems at protests, and was vocal against the Mubarak regime’s corruption
and the president’s plans to transfer power to his son. Revered as a leftist
whose life and corpus straddle so many signal moments in the region’s history,
Negm, by virtue of his masterly vernacular poetry, remains incomparable.
The poems will speak to newly “blossoming flowers” through the vicissitudes
that lie ahead for the region “from the Gulf to the Ocean” in completing
the work begun in 2011; and beyond that, the poems will speak to anyone
who cares about the integrity of the word and the craft of poetry.
Ahmed Fouad Negm is also transliterated as Ahmad Fu'ad Nijm
50
51
Works Cited and Further Reading
‘Abd al-Fattah, Ibrahim. ‘Safir al-Fuqara’. Akhbar al-Adab,
15 September 2013.
Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development,
Ahmed Fouad Negm award citation: http://www.
princeclausfund.org/en/programmes/awards.
Abdalla, Ahmed. The Student Movement and National
Politics in Egypt 1923–1973. London: Al Saqi, 1985.
Radwan, Noha. Egyptian Colloquial Poetry in the Modern
Arabic Canon: New Readings of Shi‘r al-‘aˉmmiyya. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Abdel-Malek, Kamal. A Study on the Vernacular Poetry of
Ah.mad Fu’aˉd Nigm. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990.
Said, Edward W. Representations of the Intellectual.
New York: Pantheon Books, 1994.
____________. Al-Tariq ila Thawrat 25 Yanayir fi Shi‘r
Ahmad Fu’ad Nigm. Cairo: General Egyptian Book
Organization, 2012.
Soueif, Ahdaf. In the Eye of the Sun. London:
Bloomsbury, 1992.
Abou-bakr, Randa. ‘The Political Prisoner as Antihero:
The Prison Poetry of Wole Soyinka and ’Ahmad Fu’ad
Nigm’. Comparative Literature Studies 46.2 (2009):
261–286.
Notes
Booth, Marilyn. Bayram al-Tunisi’s Egypt: Social Criticism
and Narrative Strategies. Exeter: Ithaca Press (St.
Antony’s Middle East Monographs no. 22), 1990.
Cachia, Pierre. Popular Narrative Ballads of Modern Egypt.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Chahine,Youssef, dir. Al-‘Usfur (clip). Misr International
Films and l’Oncic, 1972. http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=jFAHrAaixfY.
Al-Hadi, ‘Umar. ‘Shuhada’ Thawrat 25 Yanayir…
al-Ward illi Fattah fi Ganayin Masr’. Al-Misri al-Yawm,
6 February 2011.
Hirst, David and Irene Beeson. Sadat. London:
Faber and Faber, 1981.
‘Isa, Imam (Sheikh), musical composition and
performance. ‘Bahiyya’. http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=CKlE8GSUEOQ.
____________. ‘Baqarit Haha’. http://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=7Y7URCj6rFI.
____________. ‘Guevara Mat’. http://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=tqnyhP7N0rs.
____________. ‘Nixon’. http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=9p2jauOUBUk.
‘Isa, Salah. Sha‘ir Takdir al-Amn al-‘Am. Cairo:
Dar al-Shuruq, 2007.
Iskindirilla band performance. ‘Bahiyya’. http://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=7loyzu3OI6k.
Negm, Ahmed Fouad [Nigm, Ahmad Fu’ad].
Al-A‘mal al-Kamila. Cairo: Dar al-Ahmadi, 1998.
____________. Blog: http://elfagoomy.blogspot.com.
____________. Al-Fagumi: al-Sira al-Dhatiyya al-Kamila.
Cairo: Maktabat Jazirat al-Wurud, 2009.
____________. Ya Ahli ya Hubbi ya Hitta min Qalbi.
Cairo: Dar al-Shuruq, 2008.
8Radwan, Egyptian Colloquial Poetry in the Modern
Arabic Canon, 37. See also ibid., 53–61 on the
“subject matter and themes” of these poets. On
Bayram al-Tunisi, see Booth, Bayram al-Tunisi’s Egypt.
9Radwan, Egyptian Colloquial Poetry in the Modern
Arabic Canon, 39; see also 40–48.
10See Negm, al-Fagumi, 195–240, 293 and, on reading
the complete works of Bayram al-Tunisi, 301–03.
On Negm’s becoming acquainted with Fu’ad
Haddad’s poetry while in prison, see ibid., 179.
11Negm, al-A‘mal al-Kamila, 382–84; this and other
quotations from Negm’s poems are my translation.
For ‘Nawwara’, see ibid., 98-108 and for ‘Ughniyya
Hizar’, 404–405. Abdel-Malek, A Study on the
Vernacular Poetry of Ah.mad Fu’aˉd Nigm, 17, observes
that: “From 1967 onward, Egypt would loom large
in the poet’s consciousness, now replacing the
woman as a beloved, now subsuming her.”
1See Negm, Ya Ahli ya Hubbi ya Hitta min Qalbi,
85–88. In invoking the adage “speaking truth to
power” I adduce Said, Representations of the
Intellectual, 85–102, and echo the Prince Claus
Award citation for Negm: http://www.
princeclausfund.org/en/programmes/awards.
Abdel-Malek, A Study on the Vernacular Poetry of
Ah.mad Fu’aˉd Nigm, attributes Negm’s poetry’s
“appeal to widely diverse segments of the society”
to the use of “colloquial and… various folk forms”,
that “it is protest poetry”, and “it is highly
melodious and thus easy to memorize”.
Quotations from ibid., 105.
12For ‘Bahiyya’, see Negm, al-A‘mal al-Kamila, 24–27.
For a recording of Sheikh Imam singing ‘Bahiyya’, see:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKlE8GSUEOQ;
for a clip of the closing sequences of Youssef
Chahine’s Al ‘Usfur (The Sparrow) with verses
from the same lyric voiced over, see: http://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=jFAHrAaixfY; for a recent
performance of this lyric by a young band,
Iskindirilla, see: http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=7loyzu3OI6k.
2“Ambassador of the poor” is the Arabic title of
‘Abd al-Fattah’s tribute to Negm, “Safir al-Fuqara’.”
For biographical information on Sheikh Imam, see
‘Isa, Sha‘ir Takdir al-Amn al-‘Am, 19–20. For the first
encounter between the poet and Sheikh Imam, see
Negm, al-Fagumi, 188–192.
13Negm, al-A‘mal al-Kamila, 569–572; quotations from
570, 572. For a recording of a performance of
‘Baqarit Haha’ by Sheikh Imam, see: http://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=7Y7URCj6rFI. For ‘Risala’,
see Negm, al-A‘mal al-Kamila, 344–347; the date of
composition of this poem, given in the volume as 9
June 1967, seems to be a typo. The date cited
above, 8 June, is as given in Negm, al-Fagumi, 336.
3Negm, al-Fagumi, 26. On the mawwal genre,
see Cachia, Popular Narrative Ballads of Modern
Egypt. On Negm’s use of the mawwal genre, see
Abdel-Malek, A Study on the Vernacular Poetry
of Ah.mad Fu’aˉd Nigm, 89–94. Negm’s resonance
in Egypt’s 2011 Revolution is suggested in
Abdel-Malek’s al-Tariq ila Thawrat 25 Yanayir fi Shi‘r
Ahmad Fu’ad Nigm (The Road to the 25 January
Revolution in Ahmad Fu’ad Nigm’s Poetry), which
is essentially a translation of his Study on the
Vernacular Poetry of Ah.mad Fu’aˉd Nigm with a
different appendix, containing a 2009 poem by
Negm protesting against the then President
Mubarak, on which see ibid., 197–199; Radwan,
in Egyptian Colloquial Poetry in the Modern Arabic
Canon, addresses how “Egyptian Colloquial Poetry
Blooms in the Arab Spring”, the subtitle of her
“Postscript”, 205–211.
14Quotations from ‘Isa, Sha‘ir Takdir al-Amn al-‘Am,
27, 28. See also ibid., 25–28 on the poems of this
period.
15The song is reproduced in Negm, al-Fagumi, 97–98.
16Abdel-Malek, A Study on the Vernacular Poetry of
Ah.mad Fu’aˉd Nigm, 89–104, quotation from 89.
I reproduce here Abdel-Malek’s terms for the
different categories he discusses under the subtitle
“folkloric forms”.
17Ibid., 98-99. For this poem, see Negm, al-A‘mal
al-Kamila, 339–341. I quote the opening verses
from ibid., 339.
4Quotation from Negm, al-Fagumi, 149. I rely here
on ibid., 125–185.
18Quotation from Negm, al-A‘mal al-Kamila, 339. See
al-Hadi, ‘Shuhada’ Thawrat 25 Yanayir… al-Ward illi
Fattah fi Ganayin Masr’. On the circumstances
surrounding the composition of ‘Sabah al-Khayr’,
see ‘Isa, Sha‘ir Takdir al-Amn al-‘Am, 44.
5Negm, al-A‘mal al-Kamila, n.p.
6Negm, al-Fagumi, 154.
7See Negm, al-Fagumi, 173–319.
52
53
19See Abdalla, The Student Movement and National
Politics in Egypt 1923–1973, Hirst and Beeson,
Sadat, and ‘Isa, Sha‘ir Takdir al-Amn al-‘Am.
20The quoted phrase is a rough translation of
the title of ‘Isa’s book, Sha‘ir Takdir al-Amn al-‘Am,
which researches legal documents pertaining to
interrogations of the poet and his imprisonment.
21Negm, al-A‘mal al-Kamila, 144–155; quotation
from 144.
22Quotation from Abou-bakr, ‘The Political Prisoner
as Antihero: The Prison Poetry of Wole Soyinka
and ’Ahmad Fu’ad Nigm’, 283. Abou-bakr’s article
provides a rich discussion of Negm’s prison poetry.
23See, respectively, Negm, al-A‘mal al-Kamila, 83–97,
479–481 and 464–466; quotation from 465.
24‘Isa, Sha‘ir Takdir al-Amn al-‘Am, 62, 64.
25Soueif, In the Eye of the Sun, 496–497; Asya's
commentary continues until 499. For ‘Nixon’,
see Negm, al-A‘mal al-Kamila, 510–513. For Sheikh
Imam’s performance of this song, see: http://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=9p2jauOUBUk.
26Negm, al-A‘mal al-Kamila,122.
27Ibid., 485.
28Ibid., 586, 588, 589.
29Ibid., 590, 591, 593, 594. For Sheikh Imam’s
performance of this song, see: http://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=tqnyhP7N0rs.
Exploding into the Seventies:
Ahmed Fouad Negm, Sheikh Imam,
and the Aesthetics of a New
Youth Politics
by Marilyn Booth
54
55
The power of artistic creation in performance to express collective political
sentiments and to galvanise mass oppositional action has rarely been so
clearly demonstrated as it was in the months after June 1967. All across the
Arab world, citizens and subjects had witnessed the spectacular mismatch
of official discourse and government action following Israel’s defeat of Arab
forces and occupation of Arab territories. Stunned silence soon turned to
anguished questioning and angry grieving on the part of millions. In Egypt,
would disillusionment have metamorphosed into a broad, loud and studentled critique of the Nasser regime had it not been for the force of a symbiotic
artistic partnership? A ragged-looking poet and a slightly built composersinger with a wicked grin became the performative beacon of a movement
that challenged the final years of the Nasser regime and beyond, bringing
together students, workers and other activists through an aesthetic presence
that remains symbolically potent even now. If cultural work is always crucial
to articulating shared sentiments as political discourse, only sometimes
does such work sustain public political action.
Ahmed Fouad Negm (b. 1929) wandered from a village childhood in
the Egyptian Delta province of Sharqiyya, to an orphanage after his father’s
early death, to farm work and employment in British occupation army camps
near Suez. And then, on he went to prison on a forgery charge.With a prison
officer’s encouragement, he submitted his colloquial Arabic poetry for a
state prize and won, ironically foreshadowing the fact that many of his later
poems would be composed from prison.
Sheikh Imam ‘Isa (1918–95) went blind a few months after birth, moved
at age 13 to Cairo to be trained as a Qur’an reciter, and found himself ejected
from a religious institute because he haunted cafés and listened to tunes.
From the mid 1940s until the early 1960s, he scratched out a living by hiring
himself out to sing at weddings and other occasions while studying the secular
musical compositions of Sayyid Darwish, Zakariyya Ahmad and others.1
It was May 1962 when the duo first encountered each other, shortly
after Negm left prison. They met in Sheikh Imam’s one-room dwelling atop
an old residence in medieval Cairo in May 1962 – in Khosh Qadam alley in
al-Ghuriyya, later a true secular mecca for Egyptian and other Arab intellectuals.
They exploded onto the public scene soon after the June 1967 War, first in
print with Negm’s immediate poetic commentary on the defeat and then
in song. Their synergistic inseparability soon earned them the name “NegmImam”. Their songs, performed to the accompaniment of Sheikh Imam’s
‘ud (lute), portrayed, chided and celebrated the student- and worker-led
movement of resistance to practices of the Nasser regime, and then, after
Nasser’s death in 1970, to his successor Anwar al-Sadat’s turn toward
openness to Euro/American financial, commercial and political interests,
including support of the Israeli state.
To explore this duet’s aesthetic-political power vis-à-vis the crystallising
alliance between university students and factory workers from the late 1960s
into the early 1970s, I focus on a few poems in a very large and temporally
extended corpus – poems from the dawn of Negm-Imam’s fame. A longer
study would carry the story on as far as the Bread Riots of January 1977
when Egyptians choked the streets of Cairo and other cities in protest of
the government’s lifting of basic food subsidies under pressure from inter­­­­­­
national lending institutions.Tracing this sung poetry in the context of the
student-worker movement, I argue that Negm-Imam’s lyrics and music
fashioned a particularly effective political aesthetics for the moment, one
that was extraordinarily powerful in a movement that by necessity com­­­
municated mostly through word of mouth.2 It was not just the message but
rather the particular coherence of language, sound images, performance
techniques and contextual performance elements – a performative enactment
of the messages they were singing – that underlay the fast rise to fame and
the political efficacy of this amazing and unique pair of artists, neither of
whom is likely to have achieved such a powerful voice on his own.
These songs circulated through underground tapes and concerts, often
impromptu, hastily arranged, or private and advertised only by word of
mouth (including one in my home in Cairo in 1980).3 They drew on oral
storytelling, traditions of song and vernacular Arabic poetry, popular proverbs
and other deeply-rooted expressive forms to couch a political voice that
enacted a collectivity of those who felt disempowered but were not voiceless
and refused to accept that status. To this day, these songs circulate in the
memories of 1960s activists and onlookers, emotionally charged aesthetic
echoes that strongly helped to shape a powerful set of political moments.
I know that I am not alone in declaring that I cannot read or recite these
poems without singing them or at least hearing Sheikh Imam’s voice and
oud in my head. As a literary critic, I can appreciate and dissect the poems.
But I found, returning to these poems years after I first knew them, and
before I started listening to my old tapes, that I could not simply read them.
I had to sing them: the music was there in my mind. So perfect is the fusion
of song, articulation and lyrics that these works must have coalesced in
a process of collective composition. Or perhaps it is simply vital that the
listener believes this. I listen carefully to the fact that I cannot think or
feel these poems without thinking and feeling their performance as songs.
A Meeting of Minds and Voices
In their respective memoirs and in interviews, Ahmed Fouad Negm and
Sheikh Imam ‘Isa have recalled their first meeting. Negm was taken to Imam
by a mutual friend. Negm described the moment in almost epiphanal terms
56
57
to journalist and activist Farida al-Naqqash in the late 1970s.4 It is worth
listening to Negm’s memory of how the meeting shaped his subsequent art:
“I followed my friend along the crowded way into Ghuriyya. From the window
of a small house I heard his voice and his lute. At that time, he was singing
the tunes of Sheikh Zachariyya Ahmad and Abd al-Wahhab. Even though he
had not yet attempted his own compositions, I felt immediately that I was
standing before a truly creative artist. I knew by heart the original songs
he was singing, but every time I heard him singing them I felt that he was
adding his own original elements to them.With the passage of time, I became
convinced that Abd al-Wahhab was the imitation and Sheik Imam was the
original.”5
Negm said that: “It was a summer night in 1962, the most important
night of my life.”6 Indeed, the impact of this meeting on Negm appears to
have been nearly immediate and absolutely decisive (at least in the retro­­
spective vision of memory). He told al-Naqqash: “The musicality of my
poetry grew as I listened to the Sheikh, and my use of anecdotes and jokes,
and of caricatures, grew and crystallised to become a fundamental element
in poems I wrote afterward. When he began to set my words to music, my
sense of responsibility increased sharply, for the melody and the rendition,
especially for a man who carries in his very depths all this heritage, place
the poet squarely in front of the masses, directly and immediately.”7
The pair began to perform for a few friends, at neighbourhood weddings
and in cafés. Down and out in Khosh Qadam, they were a couple of adept
tricksters, cadging a kilo of kebab from a would-be songster.8 (Later on,
providing that kilo of kebab was de rigueur for anyone wanting to host
Negm-Imam.) At the same time, Negm was exploring the world of Cairo
journalism and songwriting,9 and artists were beginning to show up in
Sheikh Imam’s room – “in the first tourist visit to this remote spot in the
bowels of the republic of the lowest of the low, on the margins of the
farflung city of Cairo of the 60s.”10
In his memoirs, Negm provides a taste of the collaborative work that
went on, “a workshop night and day”. Negm might have been a powerful
poet no matter what; and Imam was an able and creative artist. But the
absolute synergy and match between words and song and performance
which are a key to the power of Negm-Imam’s works began to gel then,
in those rooms in Khosh Qadam.
While political events from 1967 to the end of the 1970s produced
Negm-Imam’s most lauded works and performances, it would be misleading
to disconnect that decade from anything that came before. Although Salah
‘Isa argues that Negm “had no connection to politics or matters of govern­­
ment and did not write about them in his poetry before 5 June 1967,”11
an embryonic populist and oppositional political identity is visible in Negm’s
much earlier poems, including poems written before he met Sheikh Imam.
That identity-in-poetry is shaped through nationalist and anti-imperialist
sentiments that crystallised during his time working in the Canal Zone.
Negm was among the 80,000 workers who deserted British occupation
army bases in 1951 in a boycott organised in response to the Wafd govern­­
ment’s urging. In his memoirs, he recalls the Canal Zone as the crucible of
popular resistance. Drawing on a familiar trope, the nation as fecund woman
(an image which surfaces in his poems), Negm recalls the atmosphere
in 1951: “In those days Egypt was pregnant with something. Perhaps the
features were not clear, but the pregnancy was certain, real, and obvious;
everyone, of all [political] directions and rungs of the social ladder were
waiting, as if they had an appointment with the moment of birth.”12
Nor was this the young man’s first presence in the political melee. As
a teenager, he witnessed the 1946 student upheavals while selling stationery
to tram riders; he traces the marching students from al-Azhar along the
tramway route.13 His earlier poems show a sense of class grievance and
polarisation, intensified, it seems likely, by his experience in prison (1959–62)
where he also got to know a number of Egyptian communists. Likewise,
Imam had not been isolated from politics, according to his own narrative:
“I participated among al-Azhar University students in demonstrations
against the king and the English [before 1952]”; anger at oppression
“was rooted in me from childhood.”14
It was in the early 1960s, too, that Negm first read the poems of
Bayram al-Tunisi, the great vernacular poet of an earlier generation,
banished from Egypt in 1919 for having allegedly insulted the royal family in
verse.15 Bayram’s voice had a strong impact on Negm’s poetic formation and
his move toward a political voice constructed on the popular oral heritages
of the Egyptian countryside and urban quarter. Indeed, Negm attributes his
political-aesthetic awakening (and specifically, the concept of the union of
politics and poetry) to reading Bayram’s poetry.16 The zajals (strophic poetry
based on colloquial oral speech and set rhythmic and rhyme patterns) in
his 1964 collection Suwar min al-hayat wa’l-sijn (Images from/of Life and
Prison) are strong poems in the critical social tradition of Bayram al-Tunisi
and others. They exhibit a thoroughgoing social conscience and a slightly
rebellious identity, resisting patriarchal familial control. In one, a peasant
addresses a feudalist, as Bayram al-Tunisi’s poems had done.17 Yet they do
not point in the direction that Negm’s poems would later take.
Among others, Muhammad Baghdadi, at the time a student from the
provinces newly in Cairo, suggests that the period 1962-67, when Negm
and Imam were performing together but as yet had a meager and very
localised following, was a space of gradual political maturation for Negm’s
poetic vision, honed by the continuing hardship of daily life. Negm and
Imam had been trying to garner local audiences through appearances in
cafés; crashing the music hall circuit, Negm recalled, “we were laughed off
the stage.”18 In sum, a close reading of their songs but also of the duo’s
memoirs and of others’ memories of them suggests that the fairly traditional
compositions that each was producing gave way through the synergy of
encounter to newer and bolder art. It was a convergence already happening
when the 1967 defeat demanded new voices.
As for so many other Egyptians, though, the 1967 war did mark an
emotional and political milestone, a devastating indication that the regime
was not only repressive but also weak. Negm “disappeared into his room
for days, and came out having written ‘Al-Balagh Ruqm 1’ [‘Manifesto No. 1’,
also known as ‘al-Hamdu lillah’] … a clear indictment of the military
bureaucracy.”19 Negm calls it “the first war dispatch from the operations
room at Khosh Qadam”, saying that when it was published “it spread like
flame across kindling because this was my first direct scuffle with the
authorities and first forthright attack on Nasser personally”.20 Workers
circulated it on the factory floor and people flocked to the alley.
And, by the time the students were ready to erupt, Negm-Imam
were ready, artistically, to join them.
A Poem, a Manifesto
If the sun were to drown
In the sea of sad clouds
If the earth were engulfed
By a wave of dark shrouds
And sight died away
From all eyes and all minds
And the pathway went missing
Amidst circles and lines
You might get around
(You think you’re so wise!)
Yet you haven’t a guide
But the words’ very eyes21
58
59
This short poem’s final line is open to more than one meaning, as we shall
see. It is no surprise that this poem opens Negm’s first post-1967 collection
by the same name, ‘Uyun il-kalam (The Eyes of Words, 1976).22 Nor is it
sur­­­­­­­prising that his poem ‘The Eyes of Words’ (1970?) opened many of the
pair’s performances.23 The poem is a manifesto, a challenge to the unnamed
reader/auditor, a reminder that in a world fogged over by politicians’ lies
and silences – metaphorically, a world veiled in clouds that are, as the word
Mute voiceless quiet mute
All words have died away
And walls of a thousand houses
Swap shushed-up words with me
ghamam suggests, perhaps grieved by their obfuscating role – the only guiding
light remains “words”. Darkness, zalam, echoes zulm, oppression or tyranny,
persistent wrong visited on others. In such murky conditions, sight, perception
and judgment are impossible, and one loses one’s way amongst the hazy
evasions of politics (“circles and lines”; the latter also connotes plans). The
binding image of the poem and the collection, ‘uyun il-kalam, is a powerful
one: the words’ very eyes – words that see, that penetrate, that reveal the
truth – but also, perhaps, echoing another sense, ‘ayn as essence: the very
essences of words (although ‘ayn is only used in the singular in this sense,
and so this can only be an echo). Furthermore, we may read ‘ayn as a well
or life source: the underground sources of sustenance that well up to create
new life. Finally, ‘uyun il-kalam might also intimate the holes between words,
the spaces, the silences, the things not-said, the things not permitted to
be said, things buried in the “dark shrouds” of political repression and the
“circles and lines” of political rhetoric that spins and eludes; that refuses
to be held accountable.
Here we have a manifesto of simple images but profound echoes,
a song-poem that draws on apocalyptic natural processes to allegorise
apocalyptic politics. But, contrary to natural processes, the man-made
processes of politics can be met and resisted if words in their profundity,
the essences of words, not the shallow words of the political centre, truly
receive a hearing; if words, as well as the silences between them, are trusted.
The movement from apocalyptic natural images and inexorable move­­­
ment on a grand scale, to the quiet power of words and silences happens
not only through Negm’s lyrics but also through Imam’s performance. The
declarative tone of the first lines, sermon-like and solemn, gives way to a
more joyful and less pronounced evocation of words, following the swirl
of “circles and lines”.
If the necessity and urgency of words are a leitmotif for this duo,
the death of speech – with its necessary, and always political, revival, as an
ultimate challenge to the authorities – forms a constant thematic rhythm
in Negm-Imam’s compositions. In the 1968 poem ‘Is-Samt’ (‘Silence’),
Negm excoriates those who do not speak; here, he pinpoints the holes
between words. A near-synonym to samt composes the first three lines
and the second section’s intensified first line: near but not exact, suggesting
not absolute silence but the act of muting oneself.
Voiceless quiet
Voiceless
Mute
Tales behind that hush
So full of speech yet I am dumb
Am dumb from mute surrounds
Mute voiceless quiet mute
But our silence is a sense
More eloquent than words
And everyone who’s heard us
Knows exactly what we say
He who brought us together
Must utter words today
Must say, Silence has died
Must scream into the hush
Mute voiceless quiet mute24
The poem, composed in 1968, takes aim at the regime’s lack of self-critique
after June 1967. Constituting a direct challenge to the Nasserist leadership
that it voices for and speaks to Egyptians as audience and as comrades,
the poem also insists that the regime allow speech, for a repressive hush
– a void in the centre of the public space – has pervaded the nation.
‘Is-Samt’ is contemporary with the rebirth of Egypt’s student movement.
Among students and other intellectuals, unease at Nasserist practices at
home had begun to turn into a broader and more pointed critique of postmonarchical Egypt, although most critics shared the ideological direction
of the regime. Concomitantly, Negm-Imam’s songs shifted from mourning
the defeat – albeit with caustic criticism of the leadership’s self-serving
deceptions and willingness to sacrifice the populace – to a more compre­­
hensive attack on the practices of those associated with the regime and the
overarching climate of “muteness”, of the disfranchising and silencing of citizens.
The Student Movement, the Left, and the Expressive Politics of Opposition
60
61
Nasser and his associates had managed to suppress organised opposition
as they consolidated control, not only by outright banning of organisations
but also by co-opting elements of the population – not least by having
garnered genuine enthusiasm for the 1952 revolution, and then offering
entitlements to key constituencies, notably university-bound youth.
In his definitive study of the student movement in Egypt, the late
Ahmed Abdalla shows how Nasser drew students into the regime’s fold
through tactics of socio-economic levelling that promised to enact Nasser’s
socialist principles. The regime increased the education budget hugely,
expanded secondary and university education, reduced and then eliminated
student fees, and gave students special privileges. From 1964, graduates
were guaranteed civil service jobs, originally a temporary measure that the
state could not retract even as the burden on the public sector became
untenable. The combined impact of these policies meant that, in Carrie
Rosefsky Wickham’s words, “From 1954 to 1967, Egypt’s educated strata
ceased to function as the country’s leading source of opposition activism.”25
Yet widened access to state institutions and social mobility, growing
expectations and new horizons, were not matched by state capabilities.
Moreover, with economic stagnation in the 1960s, graduates’ earning power
was sinking.26 With socialist revolution emerging as less than revolutionary
and less than successful, co-optation on a broad scale was no longer so
effective.
What had been a ready constituency for Nasser’s Third-Worldist
socialism found the political structure they had espoused sagging.27 Yet,
youth activism was not simply a product of disappointed hopes and
thwarted trajectories; it was also an outcome of a yearning for participation
and freedom to speak and act, particularly since many students did support
the regime’s stated goals and wanted a critical hand in steering the gleaming
new revolutionary ship of state. Within their own world, growing unease
before June 1967 and then active opposition afterward, also responded to
the regime’s controlling hand on campuses. As summarised by Wickham,
“Soon after consolidating power, Nasser reorganised the universities,
banning independent student unions, purging faculty and administration,
and posting security police units on campus.”28
There were no independent outlets for students’ political ambitions.29
Harsh repression and university closures quieted student unrest, but ulti­­mately
contributed to its eruption. Pervasive surveillance and co-optation of
university staff and students as eyes of the regime, notes Ahmed Abdalla,
demoralised campus populations increasingly; there was lessened respect
from students toward teachers constrained not to answer questions or
foster independent thinking. In sum, says Ahmed: “Students welcomed the
social and economic achievements of the Revolution and responded to the
euphoria and sense of national pride inspired by Nasser’s leadership. They
also responded to the government’s offer of wider educational opportunities
and guaranteed employment… Only after the massive national defeat of
1967, and the slowing down of the regime’s social programme due to the
burden of military expenditure, did an eventual split between the regime
and its student body become a real possibility.”30
If June 1967 yielded stunned disbelief nationwide, it was only in
February 1968 that a significant popular disturbance challenged the regime.31
The events of February 1968 began when munitions workers in Helwan
demonstrated, on 21 February, to protest their sense that military officers
62
63
had been handed overly lenient sentences for their role in the military defeat.
After clashes with the police, the unrest spread. February 21 happened to
be Students’ Day, an annual commemoration of the 1946 student uprising.
Workers were joined by students, who organised discussion forums at which
they grilled officials. Only after that did students leave campus, marching
through the Cairo and Alexandria streets in the thousands. Having been
assured by Parliament Speaker Anwar al-Sadat that they could safely present
student demands to parliament, a group of engineering students did so and
then were promptly arrested, resulting in a mass three-day sit-in beginning
on 25 February. A compromise was reached by allowing a roster of student
demands to be presented more formally to parliament. Central were demands
for democracy and abolishing the police state.32 “The uprising of February
1968 marked the students’ initial reaction to the defeat and the beginning
of their confrontation with the regime,” concludes Abdalla. “It reflected the
failure of the official youth organisations … to contain their movement. Its
intensity was attributable to the scale of the military defeat itself as much
as to the constraints on self-expression among students and intellectuals
long before the defeat.”33 In 1968, says Wickham, “student activists were
self conscious about their position as the country’s only vocal opponents
of the regime’s policy.”34 Negm and Imam were placed to channel this
potential vocality through their megaphone, yet this aesthetic-political synergy
is all the more stunning for not having been a matter of conscious planning.
For, meanwhile, back in Ghuriyya, if intellectuals and workers were
coming to Khosh Qadam, students en masse had not yet found the pair.
But a single song changed that. ‘Jifara mat’ (‘Guevara has died’), composed
in late 1967, immediately caught the political and emotional imaginations
of restless students. “This was our way to the hearts of the students,” Negm
said a decade later.35 Said Imam, “This was the song that put my name and
Negm’s on every tongue… My name became ‘the Sheikh Imam who does
Guevara’.”36 And when recording executives from Cuba showed up at the
pair’s door, Egypt’s intelligentsia began to take note. But what made
the song particularly powerful was that through evoking a world hero,
Negm-Imam addressed local issues.
The Argentinian-born revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara, active
with Castro’s revolutionaries and then a senior official in Cuba’s government
after Batista’s overthrow, and later a revolutionary theorist, was killed in
Bolivia while training guerilla troops, on 9 October 1967. Che became
an instant martyr-hero for leftist activists across the globe. For Egyptians,
wounded by June 1967 and witnessing the fervour of growing student unrest,
this solemn memorial to Guevara’s ultimate sacrifice in the cause of mass
resistance to tyranny struck strong chords. It would continue to do so,
often ending Negm-Imam’s concerts through the years. As one participant
The short, stark language of news announcements – Jifara mat – contrasts
with the invoked fullness of the popular response, everywhere, as the news
echoes from the radios to the streets, bringing people of different identities
together. This also has the effect of reminding listeners that just as Guevara
is not alone in his death, the Egyptian people are not alone in their struggle.
The poet turns from reportage to direct address, a pluralised interlocutor,
those who must be held accountable, whether for Egypt’s defeat or the
Bolivian rebels’ or others around the world.
reminisced, “Sheikh Imam moved our emotions strongly… especially with
those songs expressing the reality of poverty and suppression that we
suffered then. An evening performance would usually end with the song
‘Guevara has died’… that song still has such a powerful impact on me
that I all but cry when I hear it even now. Perhaps it is a longing for
those days…”
Guevara has died
Guevara has died
Late-breaking news, all the radios cried
And what think YOU (your wealth and might live long!),
You antique and twisted gnomes?
Your bodies oozing, fed so well
On tasty morsels with the trappings
You, sitting comfy, cozily warm
Though firing up your heaters still
Garish, showy dopes you are!
With your polished nodding pates…
A stark announcement, a sort of campus wall magazine declaration made
aural, a piece of counter-news contesting the preoccupations of the official
news, the poem implicitly enacts a broad solidarity as it eulogises the Cuban
hero in Arabic terms that construct the mythological afterlife of traditional
Egyptian and Arab heroes even as it gestures to the role of modern mass
media in making such solidarities possible. Guevara is a gada’, and women’s
mourning rhetoric for a young, strong, protective son embraces him: ya miit
khusara, “O a hundred losses”. Moreover, the poet praises Guevara for
eschewing the crown of public heroism, for not seeking the limelight,
juxtaposed critically in the poem with the contrasting practices of others,
implicitly ‘unheroic’ local politicians and military leaders.
And in the churches
And the mosques
In the alleys
And the streets
In cafés and in the bars:
Guevara has died
Guevara has died
Voices ply endless ropes of speech…
Paragon of fighters, now dead and gone
Aah, sigh a hundred for the loss of men!
In thickets deep the young swain perished
Still atop his firing gun
Dead, he gives body to his fight
He’s done it all in silence
No drummers explode in ragged sound
No communiqué goes sailing round
64
65
Like his “teacher”, Bayram al-Tunisi, Negm is a brilliant punner, exploiting
the double meanings of colloquial terms, sometimes the gap between standard
and slang meanings. Ya antiikat (“You antique ones”) he addresses the regime’s
leaders and supporters, also defining them as an older generation, “O you
antique [or ancient] ones”, hinting at their strong affinities with prerevolutionary politicians. Simultaneously, this term signifies funny-looking or
grotesque. It also exploits the old (and cross-cultural) practice of suggesting
that a person’s morals and personality are written vividly across the face;
that surface reveals depth. Even in this powerful funeral dirge, the bitterly
caricatured portrait of those who should have been Guevara’s – and the
students’ – supporters, but have instead become their nemesis, invades the
mourning with sharp reality. Finally, it counters Nasser’s Third World politics
of solidarity by suggesting that a Third World hero (Guevara) represents
the opposite of Nasser as Third World ideal.
While Negm is pun-master, Imam, in his composition and performance,
draws out and complicates double meanings through intonation, accent and
emphasis. Imam’s music – and the duo’s performance – of this poem-song
are crucial to its force. A funeral dirge, the tonal line descending, backed by
mournful “ahat” (the opposite of many of the crescendos to which Imam’s
songs reach), the song is also punctuated by a march beat, the sound of
collective footfalls en marche; the sound, perhaps, not only of a march to
the grave but of an inexorable forward march in the wake of this world
hero’s death. The music and Imam’s singing are simultaneously funereal
and upbeat.
Midway, a short series of raps might echo the nailing down of the coffin
(of Third World strategic hopes?). It moves the song into a different
intensity and a higher and faster tone, as if to suggest that Guevara’s death
is not an end but a continuation and a beginning. In the second direct
address, the poet turns from the antiikat to the rest of the populace – “O
workers, O deprived” who, in contrast, are “bound in chains/feet and head”.
From a funeral dirge, the poem becomes a call to arms to follow in Guevara’s
path, a declaration that only armed struggle can allow the powerless any
participation or hope. Performed in the heat of the first serious popular
challenge to the Nasser regime, “The word goes to [those who have] fire
and iron”, recognition of present power inequalities and simultaneously
a hint of what might come.
Refrains – Jifara mat Jifara mat – and the tearful, intimate and motherly
interjection ‘ayni ‘alayh (“my eye is upon him”; that is, “poor dear”) – sound
a dirge for hopes invested in Egypt’s revolutionary but tarnished hero. The
people are the martyr. Rather than military personnel shirking responsibility
for defeat, Guevara has stayed – and died – at his gun, on his own, in the
forest. If Egyptians cannot seek “the fighter’s ideal” in their own army or
leaders, they can seek “local heroes”, gada‘s, in a trans-struggle solidarity
that celebrates and learns from other people’s experiences. And so Guevara
appears the antithesis – having “died the death of men” – of the Egyptian
leadership post-1967. Negm-Imam punched the leadership in the gut by
also suggesting their lack of socially sanctioned masculinity, with the values
of bravery, honour and chivalry this implies. In the performance, with its
complex repetitions and overlain choruses, Guevara’s shadow hovers closely
over recent Egyptian history. Movingly linking a shattering world event,
another liberation struggle and Egypt, the poem localises world history
and makes the link explicit through its powerful strategy of direct address.
Negm’s clever reworkings of the regime’s bywords and his poem’s satiric
echoes of names and slogans, plus Imam’s extraordinary ability to create
musical parody in his use of tonal lines and mimicry of easily recognisable
public voices, gave to the political song in Egypt a performative punch. Negm’s
semantic puns combined with Imam’s voice puns – or, unexpected words
and incongruous voices – exploded open the closed social categories that
the revolutionary regime had not been able, or willing, to disable.37
The internal structure of these songs and their unorthodox use of
language find their correlates in the contexts of performance. Contextual
contingencies of Negm-Imam’s combined persona and presence are important
to historicise their role in Egypt’s history of oppositional movements.
Wickham characterises three modes by which authoritarian regimes
attempt to stop the emergence of opposition activism before it starts:
“disable potential agents of mobilisation [e.g., by imprisoning group
66
67
members]… control potential sites of mobilisation, [by] tolerat[ing]
the existence of an opposition group but… limit[ing] its access to the mass
public… co-opt the targets of mobilisation and ‘inoculate’ them against the
opposition group’s appeal” while buying support by distributing resources.38
As students found their voices, Negm-Imam worked against – resisted –
this co-optation by constantly reminding listeners of its dangers.They worked
against the regime’s attempt to “control… sites of mobilisation” by showing
up for impromptu concerts – literally, attacking the stage – and offering
encouragement to those who would try to retake those sites through
demonstrations, university sit-ins, occupation of university buildings, and
unofficial, unlicensed, unsanctioned publications. Negm-Imam were themselves
an unsanctioned text, a living text in dramatic performance, whose words
remained in people’s minds and on their tongues. Using such forms as children’s
songs, work songs and pseudo-security interviews, their compositions invoked
communal culture in use and insisted on participation. It is no wonder that,
as Kamal Abdel-Malek says, “In almost every manifestation of mass unrest,
whether by students, workers or both, from 1968 onward, both Negm and
Sheikh Imam were implicated and consequently arrested and locked up in
prison for ‘disturbing the public peace’.”39
It is also important that Negm and Imam refused to co-operate with
the communications channels of the state from the start, though they did
briefly flirt with the radio and TV authorities. When I interviewed Sheikh
Imam in London in 1985, for Index on Censorship, I asked him whether he
would ever reconsider that refusal, since after all, such a venue would give
him a broader audience. “I would still refuse unequivocally,” he said, “because
the state would still be the one to decide which songs to record. And I don’t
want that. After all, the mass media – the radio and television headquarters
– can be hit and disabled any time. The Israelis did so in 1967. My mass
media are the masses.”40
Following the February 1968 events, Nasser announced his 30 March
programme to liberalise the political system; yet the proclamation was not
matched by events on the ground. As Ahmed comments, “After a few months
of liberal deeds and declarations the trend was reversed and Egyptian politics
reverted to its authoritarian mould.”41 Student activism had a role in this;
after February there was space for liberal notions, but when another student
eruption followed the announcement of the new Education Bill in late
November 1968, centered in Mansura and Alexandria, this was used
by hardline elements in the regime to retract any such possibility.
By that time Negm and Imam were in jail, but their aesthetic and
political contributions to the opposition continued apace. Their work itself
constitutes a dialectical dance with imprisonment: poems written outside
prison might cause the duo’s detention, and yet those written in prison
No headline, no hack
Could keep our young away
From the cause forever here…
found their way out to the students; and the very fact that they were
composed in prison added to their oppositional power.42 The pair enacted
rather than simply articulated the issue of political freedom and the right
to dissent. Like artists before them – Bayram al-Tunisi in exile and the
19th-century poet-activist ‘Abdallah Nadim in hiding – their lives on the
run and in confinement displayed the tyranny at work which their songs
declaratively exposed.
In their first and spectacular emergence onto the public scene with poems
and songs critical of the defeat, Negm and Imam had been public celebrities:
a television show, public appearances arranged by artist-bureaucrats attached
to the regime, profiles in the press. But as their performances had turned
from critique of the military’s readiness to more pointed attacks on the
regime itself, the leader could not abide their parodying presence. Negm had
in fact attacked Nasser in his first post-1967 poem, calling him ‘Abd al-Gabbar
(servant of God/the Omnipotent, but also the Tyrant or Oppressor), and
the combination of their relentless critique and their growing popularity
earned them a life sentence decreed from the top, which turned out to
be a sentence of incarceration through the end of Nasser’s life. They spent
from mid-1968 until mid-1971 in the Barrages Prison, coming out only
after Nasser died and his successor, Anwar al-Sadat, felt securely enough
ensconced to let many imprisoned dissidents out of jail.43
They were released into the ferment of renewed student activism. Sadat’s
proclaimed “year of decision” had produced no victories, and students
were impatient. According to Ahmed Abdalla, questions of self-expression
were basic to the activism of 1972-73 “and this time its meaning broadened
to include the ultimate freedom of ideological choice”.44
“We went to Mansura, Minufiyya, Ayn Shams and elsewhere,” Imam
recalled. “We participated in the demonstrations organised by the students
in Liberation Square in 1972” demanding both war to recover territories
captured by Israel and an end to the strong security presence on campuses.45
Negm-Imam performed ‘The Students Are Back’ to the gathered crowd
in Liberation Square.
The students are back
(Look, Uncle Jack!)
To serious attack
Egypt, you’re forever here
Pick of all hopes
Football – no use!
Nor fraudulent excuse!
No Byzantine debates over nothin’
20 January 1972: the poem plays cleverly on the historical moment, the
“return” of students to openly challenging the regime after the post-1968
lull. But a physical political “return” to the scene is also a “return” to serious
effort. It is the students who are active, subjects of the verb. In contrast,
politicians and journalists – those of “Byzantine debates” (an idiom for
futile talk) – are static.
And Negm and Imam were re-arrested promptly. A mere two weeks
later, Negm composed one of his most beautiful and complex poems, ‘Baladi
wa habibati’ (‘My Country and My Beloved’), a cry from Cairo’s Ottomanera fortress, now a prison in the age of independence. For Egypt’s university
students (and many secondary students too), exposing the false promises
and premises of each regime was a primary goal. Grounding their activism
was the demand for an open system permitting forthright critique and
political discussion, and in which true political participation was possible,
both on campus and for the nation.
Negm-Imam’s targets were often more specific. In topically charged and
satirically layered sung poems, the duo attacked hollow policies and hypocrisy
among high bureaucrats, politicians and a commercial bourgeoisie that spoke
the pious language of nationalism while running after personal enrichment.
Orality was matched by visuality, in sharply drawn verbal caricatures that
were the correlate of political cartoonist (and Negm’s mentor) Higazi’s
visual ones: in the “summer [of 1967], as stiflingly under wraps as the ful
in a narrow-necked ful-pot”, Higazi was drawing the regime’s men as “fullbellied, wearing black suits, in dark glasses, and riding in late-model black
cars as they smoked Havana cigars”.46 Negm’s portraits in verse were just
as sharp: playing on the Nasserist rhetoric of “an alliance of forces”, he
satirically portrayed social categories that had benefited from the regime
and were implicated in self-interested pursuits.
68
69
My countryfolk live
And among them there ain’t
Know-how allowing the alliance to live.
Every group breathes alone
Afraid of other folks
And curtains come down over goblets and smokes
But in every mulid
O my people, O Khalid,47
We come together as buddies
And we call out, “Long live!!”
May my countryfolk live
Ya’eesh! Ya’eesh!
The thinker resides at the Café Riche
Ya’eesh! Ya’eesh!
Preening and pompous, glib, slick and loquacious:
Never goes to the demos –
Crowds? never, good gracious!
With a few empty words
And some wide turns of phrase
He whips up solutions for every bad case
The thinker lives, may he live long, live, live!
Live on, my countryfolk, live on, ya’eeesh!48
No wonder Nasser was blaming the caricaturists for his woes.49 Such
images would not only be inescapably clear to a broad audience but also
familiar, as they drew from the popular lexicon exploited by earlier poets
– notably, Bayram al-Tunisi – to make similar political points.
Yet the topical cadences produced a broad and thoroughgoing critique
of the Egyptian state’s post-1952 trajectory. Moreover, Negm’s pointed
verbal imagery and Imam’s suggestive use of musical and spoken tonalities
performed notions of outspokenness and democracy even as they employed
parody to expose official rhetorics of populism as anything but democratic.
To truly trace the role of Negm-Imam in sustaining the student move­­­
ment and giving it a sense of itself – as well as to consider how that movement
shaped the phenomenon of Negm-Imam – would require extensive work
on the ground, eliciting memories of activists. A reception-focused study
could elucidate the particular effects of this performative presence at discrete
moments, the galvanising power of certain songs, the significance of collective
moments in concerts on campuses ringed by security personnel; in sum,
the resonances of these often spontaneous – or at least unannounced –
performances in a context of flowing energies and a sense of possibility
among Egypt’s educated young. As one participant in that movement, who
was neither an organiser nor a member of a political group, recalled, “Negm’s
and Sheikh Imam’s mere presence at the university would signify, and
produce, a demonstration. I attended one of these meetings in 1973 or 1974…
an evening in which Imam sang and Negm recited some poems. It all led to
a large number of students going out in the streets and holding massive
demonstrations.”50
The Old and the Bold
70
71
One can see Negm-Imam’s lyrics and music fashioning a political aesthetics
that is new, even as it summons a long tradition of vernacular resistance
poetry.Yet, to isolate exactly what that ‘new’ consists of is not easy. For one
central element is a sustained evocation of familiar poetic structure and
diction, and musical form, associated with popular oral performance and
collective life (from mawwals to orally performed heroic epics to children’s
games). The pair’s compositions and performances combined such familiar
popular elements with a bold, indeed unafraid and utterly unapologetic political
vocality that had been largely missing in public discourse, and further, laced
this powerful mix with a deep and wry satirical humour. Furthermore, these
songs, performed, countered the “naïve folkism” that Nasserist rhetoric
– including publications for the populace in the form of poems, songs and
studies of “folk life” – incorporated.51 The combined effect of familiar expres­­­
sive modes and “outrageous” critique, or of the old and the bold, produced
a unique sphere of articulation. And surely there was a synergy at work:
were not the students as fundamental to Negm-Imam’s art and the ways
it developed as the pair were to that particular and breathtaking moment
of popular articulation and resistance in Egypt? When united to the collective
emotions and sense of possibility that propelled the student movement and
gave it broad public support, the result was politically explosive – a fact that
was not lost on the security forces at the time, for when seduction and
co-optation proved ineffective, Negm and Imam were repeatedly sent
to prison.52
Moreover, the evocation of popular oral forms and older traditions of
vernacular poetry was extraordinarily potent in a movement that by necessity
communicated mostly through word of mouth and printed ephemera, most
famously the wall-magazines of the seventies campus landscape. Not only
that, oral culture was still strong. That Negm-Imam both communicated
orally and based their aesthetic on an oral poetic tradition and a range of
popular music traditions, delivered a double dose of the oral expressive
traditional culture in which so many Egyptians were rooted by upbringing
and social context. Sheikh Imam’s voice and music drew on both secular
song traditions and the Qur’an chanting and religious compositions in
which he had been trained.53 Negm’s poetry voiced and reshaped the images,
invocations and spoken rhythms of colloquial poetic tradition. This was
crucial for the movement of which they were a part. Saad Zahran, veteran
opposition activist, explains it thus: “The Egyptian left was fundamentally a
movement of intellectuals. Although discrete groups from among the popular
classes interacted with it, the movement’s stances, outlooks and leaders
were mostly intellectuals. But what propelled the popular spirit (al-ruh
al-sha’biyya) was not documents and learned culture, not only because the
majority of people did not read and write, as is well known, but because
oral culture remained strongly influential and effective, even among the
educated. The popular spirit made its impact and was roused and stimulated
as a result of the ever present and still deeply moving oral culture: in the
era we are now in, this is represented in Islamic sermons delivered in mosques
and through media channels, which have an impact on people orally for the
most part, without requiring a resort to a real or further cultural authority.
Imam and Negm were the oral facet of the leftist movement, and therefore
their impact was huge. This influence extended to the university students
because oral culture still powerfully shapes the people’s emotional and
spiritual identities and outlooks even if they are educated. So Imam and
Negm had the ability to spark demonstrations and strikes and oppositional
assemblages. They were able to move the masses when, without them, the
leftists could not do so, except within the narrowest circles.”54
Negm was not the only vernacular poet in the 1960s and 1970s who
was fashioning a new aesthetic for colloquial poetry, leaving behind the
tradition of zajal while building on the breakthroughs in poetic form and
sensibility achieved by the great poets Salah Jahin and Fu’ad Haddad from
the 1950s on.55 Indeed, another innovative colloquial poet, Fu’ad Qa’ud,
worked with Negm and Imam for a time; Imam set to music and performed
some of his poems. But as Dalia Sa’id Mustafa argues convincingly, while
Negm learned from and worked with innovations in poetic voice crafted by
the brilliant new colloquial poets of the era – Haddad, Jahin, ‘Abd al-Rahman
al-Abnudi and others – he was not at the forefront of what was truly a
revolution in ‘ammiyya poetry.56 Yet, among the new colloquial poets of the
1960s, it was Negm – or rather, Negm-Imam – who voiced and embodied
the desires and worries of many Egyptians, post-June 1967.
Negm’s poetry, and therefore Sheikh Imam’s performances (for, as I
have suggested, performance must be emphasized as much as composition,
of both lyrics and music), are rarely couched in the third person. Poetry
and performance draw on the “I/eye” of the beholder of the state of things,
the things of the state. By using “I,” it invokes “you”, and direct address
moves from the individual “you” to the collective, emphasised through the
musical-rhetorical strategies of the refrain, repetition and dialogue. This is
poetry not to be heard in silence, and not in the first instance to be read
individually, but rather meant for choral response and involvement. It is
interactive and incitatory. It means – is meant as – action. By its very form
and mode of dissemination, this sung poetry resisted the tactics of cooptation and isolation of individuals that the regime tried to propagate.57
72
73
Foundational to this aesthetics of the interactive, the parodic and the
incitatory is a political truth claim and a refusal to be silenced, which of
course the poems enact and re-enact endlessly. The political truth claim,
by announcing the will to speak and a first-person rejection of “the lie”,
sets up a community of trust that explicitly counters and resists authorities
who claim the nation’s allegiance but are shown up as authors of doublespeak, thus, perfect targets of parody. Circling through these poems are the
poet’s and singer’s experiences, as poem after poem is dated and situated:
“written in Tura prison”, “written in detention”, “written in the Sijn al-isti’naf”.
No less than the students whose work on behalf of the nation Negm-Imam
celebrates and encourages and documents, in the very spaces and times
of their performances the two are subject to the repressive consequences
of their outspokenness, thereby demonstrating (or allowing the authorities
to demonstrate) the power of poetry and song as an aesthetic of incitement
and collective action.
If the students were the beating heart and active nerves of a political
opposition in formation, Negm and Imam seemed to offer a voice that
articulated broad concerns on which many, many Egyptians could agree,
if quietly. Recalling her political formation into principles guiding her life
and career, actress Fardous Abdel-Hamid remembers her father, a factory
owner, “clos[ing] the door to listen to secret tapes which I was to find out
[later] were the lyrics and songs of Ahmed Fouad Negm and Sheikh Imam”.58
In another resonant example, a judge, in the position of having to pronounce
a jail sentence for Negm-Imam, asked them first to perform a song.59 Rather
than speaking for, or from, one particular political agenda, Negm-Imam
seemed to breathe in and then sing out the mass disappointments and the
broad demands of those across a range of broadly leftist – and even some
emergent Islamist – positions. As one participant put it, “Hope filled us at
that time. We were certain that the demonstrations must produce results
that would be to the betterment and benefit of the populace… it’s enough
to recall that every one of us saw himself or herself as playing a role, simply
by expressing opposition, and believed that going out into the streets
would be an adequate means of pressure.”
As the question of political freedoms became increasingly central and
students grew more vocal about it, Negm-Imam rapidly garnered an audience.
Their songs of this period claimed that space of political freedom and
enacted it by blasting apart the silence, “like bullets”, as Negm himself put it.
In simple, understandable colloquial language whose metaphoric resonances
were constructed squarely on daily patterns and idioms of confrontational
speech, they articulated issues of social versus political freedom that were
being asked even within the closest circles of the regime. (There are some
wonderful stories about how people in power, or semi-power, appreciated
these poems.60) Negm-Imam’s enactment of these issues had real conse­­
quences for the two composer-performers, for the authorities recognised
the power of their performances and sought first to co-opt them and then
to silence them through imprisonment, which did not work. “The eyes’
very words” could see through prison walls.
The power Negm-Imam continued to demonstrate through the 1970s
is not depleted. New generations have taken up Sheikh Imam’s and Negm’s
performances, preserving and uploading the original songs and performing
them anew. Groups such as Awj and al-‘Awda in Palestine, Jawqet El Sheikh
Imam in Toronto, and Iskandarilla in Egypt draw nostalgic and still-hopeful
60s leftists while renewing Negm-Imam’s performative political force for
new audiences in what many of us hope is another era of ascending activism
globally. In street demonstrations of a new millennium, those songs have
been audible. The dynamic duo’s political and aesthetic force retains its aura
and its communicative power, in a new form. As today’s young Arab singers
return to the works of Negm-Imam, they locate and build an aesthetic
home for their own collective struggles.
Works cited
This essay was previously published in the American University
in Cairo Press publication Cairo Papers in Social Science, 29 nos 2–3 (2006)
Farag, Fatemeh. 1999. ‘Fardous Abdel-Hamid: The Art
of Resistance’, Al-Ahram Weekly 450 (7–13 October
1999), http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/1999/450/profile.
htm.
Abdalla, Ahmed. 1985. The Student Movement and
National Politics in Egypt 1923–1973. London:
Al Saqi Books.
Abdel-Malek, Kamal. 1990. A Study of the Vernacular
Poetry of Ahmad Fu’ad Nigm. Leiden: Brill.
Baghdadi, Muhammad. 1995. ‘Sabah al-khayr ‘ala al-ward
illi fitih fi ganayin Masr’, Ruz al-Yusuf no. 3497
(19 June 1995) 43–46.
Beinin, Joel. 1994. ‘Writing Class: Workers and Modern
Egyptian Colloquial Poetry (Zajal)’, Poetics Today 15 (2)
191–215.
Booth, Marilyn. 1985. ‘Shaykh Imam the Singer: An
Interview’. Index on Censorship 14 (3) 18–21.
____________. 1990. Bayram al‑Tunisi’s Egypt: Social
Criticism and Narrative Strategies. Exeter: Ithaca Press
(St. Antony’s Middle East Monographs no. 22), 1990.
____________. 1992a. ‘Colloquial Arabic Poetry,
Politics, and the Press in Modern Egypt’. International
Journal of Middle East Studies 24 (3) 419–40.
____________. 1992b. ‘Poetry in the Vernacular’. In
The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: Modern Arabic
Literature, ed. M. M. Badawi, 463–82. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
‘Isa, [al-Shaykh] Imam. 2001. Mudhakkirat al-Shaykh
Imam, ed. Ayman al-Hakim. Cairo: Dar al-Ahmadi
lil-nashr.
‘Isa, Salah. 1992. ‘Salah ‘Isa yuqaddimu mudhakkirat
Ahmad Fu’ad Nigm! Sha’ir takdir al-amn al-‘am!’ in
Ahmed Fouad Negm, Al-Fajumi: Mudhakkirat al-sha’ir
Ahmad Fu’ad Nigm, vol. 1, 9–28. Cairo: Dar Sfinkis
[Sphinx].
Jacquemond, Richard. 2001. ‘La poésie en Egypte
aujourd’hui: état des lieux d’un champ ‘en crise’,’
Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 21 182–231.
74
75
Kazim, Safinaz. 1992. ‘Qira’a islamiyya fi a’mal thuna’yy
Ahmad Fu’ad Nigm – al-Shaykh Imam,’ al-Hayat
no. 10671 (27 April 1992) 14.
Mustafa, Dalia Sa‘id. 2001. ‘Nigm wa’l-Shaykh Imam:
Su’ud wa uful al-ughniya al-siyasiyya fi Misr’, Alif: Journal
of Comparative Poetics 21 128–57.
al-Naqqash, Farida. 1979. ‘Muqaddima: Zahirat al-sha’ir
wa’l-shaykh’. In Ahmed Fouad Negm, Baladi wa-habibati:
qasa’id min al-mu’taqal. Beirut: Dar Ibn Khaldun 3–25.
Negm, Ahmed Fouad. 1964. Suwar min al-Hayat wa’l-sijn.
Cairo: al-Majlis al-a’la li-ra’ayat al-funun wa’l-adaab
wa’-‘ulum al-ijtima’iyya.
____________. 1976a. Bayan Hamm Beirut:
Dar Al-Farabi.
____________. 1976b. ‘Uyun il-kalam: Shi’r Ahmad
Fu’ad Nigm. Cairo: Dar al-Thaqafa al-Jadida, n.d. [1976].
Ser. Ash‘ar al-Thaqafa al-Jadida.
____________. 1979a. Baladi wa habibati: qasa’id min
al-mu’taqal. 2nd printing. Beirut: Dar Ibn Khaldun.
____________. 1979b. Ishi ya Misr. Beirut:
Dar al-Kalima.
____________. 1981. Ya’ish ahl baladi: Ash’ar misriyya.
5th printing. Beirut: Dar Ibn Khaldun.
____________. 1992. Al-Fajumi: Mudhakkirat al-sha’ir
Ahmad Fu’ad Nijm, Pt. I. Cairo: Dar Sfinks [Sphinx].
____________. 1993. Al-Fajumi: Mudhakkirat al-sha’ir
Ahmad Fu’ad Nijm, Pt. II. Cairo: Maktabat Madbuli
al-Saghir.
al-Sarki, Ashraf. 2001. ‘Hal ahtafi bi’l-mughanni al-batal?’
Reprinted in Imam ‘Isa, Mudhakkirat al-Shaykh Imam,
ed. Ayman al-Hakim, 227–39. Cairo: Dar al-Ahmadi
lil-nashr.
Wickham, Carrie Rosefsky. 2002. Mobilizing Islam:
Religion, Activism and Political Change in Egypt.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Notes
1On Negm’s and Imam’s early lives, see Booth 1985;
Negm 1992; Negm 1993; ‘Isa 2001; Abdel-Malek
1990 chap. 1. All translations in this essay are
my own.
17On Negm’s poetry as an outgrowth of worker
poetry, see Beinin 1994.
18Al-Naqqash 1979 quoted in translation in Booth
1985:19. See also Negm 1979 Baladi 12.
2Material drawn upon in this essay includes my own
collection of 27 tapes, some of which I recorded,
as well as the published poetry collections, three
quasi-autobiographical works, my 1985 interview
with Sheikh Imam, three communications (2007),
and journalistic and scholarly sources.
19‘Isa 2001:18.
3Negm’s poetry except for his first (1964)
collection was banned in Egypt at least until 1976,
according to Abdel-Malek 1990:6 citing Negm
1979:137–38.
22It also opens the 1976 collection Bayan hamm
published in Beirut (Negm 1976 bh 49).
4This is my translation, quoted with a few
modifications from Booth 1985:19.
5Al-Naqqash 1979:10–11, translated in and cited
from Booth 1985: 19. All translations from the
Arabic in this essay are mine, whether rendered
specifically for this essay or cited from an earlier
translation of mine.
6Negm 1992:248. With this climactic moment, the
first volume of Negm’s memoirs ends.
7Al-Naqqash 1979 quoted in translation in Booth
1985:19. See also Negm 1992:242–47.
8Negm 1993:97–100.
9Negm 1993:84ff.
10Negm 1993:113.
11‘Isa 1992:14.
12 Negm 1992:173.
13 Negm 1992:152–53.
14 ‘Isa 2001:67
15On Bayram al-Tunisi, see Booth 1990. Some have
said Negm first read Bayram while in prison; Negm
(1993:135–36) attributes reading Bayram seriously
to the urging of the brilliant caricaturist Hijazi,
named by Negm (1993:114–16) as a major
influence on him in this period.
16In his poem to Bayram (‘Al-Ihda’: ila Bayram’
(1971), Negm declares the continuity of poetry’s
responsibility and of his debt to Bayram: “We will
go on walking in your path / marked out by night
as people slept” and calls him ‘uyun al-shi’r, both
“eyes” and “wells” of poetry (Negm 1981:11), a
consistent imagery in Negm’s corpus: see below.
37An academic paper cannot convey the power of
this poetry, especially the bad-boy performances
of Sheikh Imam, Ahmed Fouad Negm, their stalwart
backup the artist Muhammad Ali, and occasionally
others. I think here particularly of Imam-style
“French” in his performances of ‘Faliri Jiscar Dastan’
(‘Valery Giscard d’Estaing’, 1975) – Imam’s wailing
“oui oui” counterposed to “aywa”; the nasal French
“accent” coupled with the very colloquial diction
of wa’s-sitt bitaa’tuh kamaan. This hilarious and slightly
wicked quality of performance does not of course
detract from the power of the political critique;
rather, it intensifies it. Imam’s brilliant parody of
French in this poem points up the importance
of languages and of performance in the political
world.
20Negm 1993:199.
21‘’Uyun il-kalam’, also known by its first line,
“Idha ish-shams ghirqit”; Negm 1976:7.
23It is important to consider the order in which
compositions were performed, a task beyond this
paper’s reach. Furthermore, poems composed
before 1967 become a seamless part of the
post-1967 repertoire and are frequently republished
in Beirut in the 1970s: for example, the 1965 poem
‘il-Khawaga’l-amrikani’ (Negm 1976 uk 52–54).
38Wickham 2002:10.
24The text appears in Negm 1997b:28-29 and Negm
1976a:109–10.
42Abdel-Malek (1990:9) also suggests this.
39Abdel-Malek 1990:5.
40Booth 1985:21.
41Abdalla 1985:145.
43There is disagreement on these dates of
imprison­­­ment; Abdel-Malek, for example, gives
May 1969 (1990:21). Sadat was later to order
Negm imprisoned after having faced trial on the
accusation of having insulted the president in his
poetry (1978) following the notorious satirical
mimicry of Sadat in ‘Bayan hamm’ (1977). The
substance of the public prosecutor’s case makes
clear the crucial role that performance played:
according to Salah ‘Isa, it was not the words of the
poem so much as the mode of delivery that was
under attack (1992:25). Negm went underground
for three years before the police captured him.
25Wickham 2002:31.
26Wickham 2002:31–32.
27In the mid-1960s, political scientist Malcolm Kerr
viewed the students at Egypt’s public institutions
as “among the most reliable enthusiasts of the
regime” (Wickham 2002:31).
28Wickham 2002:24.
29Students had organised a Student Front that brought
together those of different political outlooks but
they tended to back forces within the regime who
had advocated in the 1950s for civilian rule but
were unsuccessful.
44Abdalla 1985:148.
45‘Isa 2001:66.
30Abdalla 1985:137.
46Negm 1993:147.
31There had been earlier confrontations with
university teaching staff, in March 1954 (Abdalla
1985:120).
47“Khalid”, a popular given name, so “everyman”, also
means “everlasting”; but Negm applies this to his
people rather than to the Nasserist state, in a sly
reuse of state rhetoric.
32Abdalla 1985:152–53.
33Abdalla 1985:140.
48Negm 1981:71–76 [poem composed 1968],
quote, pp. 71–72.
34Wickham 2002:33.
49Negm 1993:148.
35Booth 1985:19.
50Communication to the author from Sahar Tawfiq,
February 2007.
36‘Isa 2001:51.
76
77
51See for example al-Sarki 2001. This essay also
exemplifies the contestation over memory and
over “possession” of Imam and Negm, a consistent
theme in writing about them since their breakup
in the mid-1980s. Al-Sarki accuses the Egyptian left
of celebrating “what Negm said” and isolating “what
Imam composed and performed” from broader
horizons that should have been open to him; Negm
was the dominant partner and the duo’s success
rested on his maintaining a high level of tension
with the regime based on a continuous stream
of sukhriya wa-shata’im (sarcasm and insults).
While I agree that there were certain “internal
contra­­dictions” shaping the Negm-Imam
“experience” (tajruba), I do not agree with this
narrow assessment of the bases of the oeuvre’s
popularity.
52On this, see Booth 1985.
53Safinaz Kazim (1992) emphasises this and upon it
builds an argument for an Islamic interpretation of
the oeuvre; yet, she ignores that Imam was deeply
influenced also by secular song and, with regards
to the poetry, refuses to take religious metaphors
as anything but literal.
54Communication to the author, Cairo, March 2007.
55See Booth 1992; Jacquemond 2001.
56Mustafa 2001:135–46.
57It is significant that when Negm wrote his
memoirs, he did so in an oral colloquial style; the
fascinating rhetorical structure of this two-volume
work is beyond the scope of this essay.
58Farag 1999.
59Negm 1992:320–21.
60For example in ‘Isa 1992:12–13.
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Mona Anis is Senior Editorial Consultant with al-Shorouk Publishing House, a
leading publisher in the Arab world. She is former Senior Culture Editor and former
Deputy Editor-in-Chief of al-Ahram Weekly, and has served on the Board of Editors
of al-Ahram Weekly since its foundation in 1991. She has a Masters degree in Sociology
of Literature and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Essex, UK.
Her translations from Arabic into English and vice versa include poetry by Mahmoud
Darwish, Saadi Youssef, Abdel-Rahman el-Abnoundi and Ahmed Fouad Negm, and she
was research assistant and editor (in Arabic) of the late Arab American scholar
Edward Said from 1991–2003. She writes in Arabic and English on topics including
Middle East Politics and Arabic literature. She is a founding member of the Egyptian
Committee for the Defence of National Culture and a member of the Board of
Trustees of the Center for Arab and African Studies in Cairo.
The Prince Claus Fund would like to acknowledge
assistance in the production of this publication
with heartfelt thanks to:
Salah M. Hassan, Goldwin Smith Professor
and Director Institute for Comparative Modernities,
Cornell University
The Embassy of the Kingdom
of the Netherlands in Egypt
The American University of Cairo
Marilyn Booth holds the Iraq Chair in Arabic and Islamic Studies at the
University of Edinburgh and co-directs the Centre for the Advanced Study of the
Arab World (CASAW). She has written widely on Egyptian vernacular poetry as
a form of political opposition and its relationship to forms of media in Egypt; her
first book was Bayram al Tunisi's Egypt: Social Criticism and Narrative Strategies (1990).
She is currently writing two books on early feminist writing in Egypt (1880s–1930s)
including Classes of Ladies of Cloistered Spaces:Writing Women’s History through
Biography in Fin-de-Siècle Egypt (forthcoming 2014). She edited Harem Histories:
Envisioning Places and Living Spaces (2010), and a special issue of Journal of Women’s
History on ‘Women’s autobiography in the Middle East and South Asia’ (2013). Her
14 literary translations comprise novels, short story collections and a memoir. She
is Middle East and Europe regional editor for the Encyclopaedia of Women and Islamic
Cultures (EWIC).
Hala Halim is Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies and
Comparative Literature at New York University. She has published on such subjects
as the postcolonial redrawing of British educational policies in Egypt, the films of
Youssef Chahine, E. M. Forster's Egyptian texts, and the translation and reception
of Constantine P. Cavafy's poetry in Arabic. She is currently revising a manuscript
entitled ‘The Alexandria Archive: An Archaeology of Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism’
which identifies and critiques a Eurocentric, quasi-colonial paradigm of cosmo­­
politanism associated with Alexandria and seeks out alternative modes of inter-ethnic
and inter-religious solidarity that speak to current postcolonial Middle Eastern
imperatives. She has held an Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at UCLA's
Humanities Consortium, and her translation of a novel by Mohamed El-Bisatie,
Clamor of the Lake, received an Egyptian State Incentive Award in 2006.
The Dutch Postcode Lottery
supports the Prince Claus Fund
78
79