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Homage t o a Bel l y-Dancer

The great est and most famous singer of the
twentieth-century Arab world was Um Kalthoum, whose records and
cassettes, fifteen years after her death, are available everywhere. A fair
number of non-Arabs know about her too, partly.because of the hyp-
notic and melancholy effect of her singing, partly because in the world-
wide rediscovery of aut hent i c people' s art Um Kal t houm is a
domi nant figure. But she also played a significant role in the emerging
Thi rd World women' s movement as a pious "Nightingale of the East"
whose public exposure was as a model not only of feminine con-
sciousness but also of domestic propriety. Duri ng her lifetime, there
was talk about whether or not she was a lesbian, but the sheer force of
her performances of elevated music set to classical verse overrode such
rumors. In Egypt^she was a national symbol, respected bot h duri ng the
monarchy and after the revolution led by Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Um Kalthoum' s career was extraordinarily long, and to most Arabs
it was the highly respectable while very romantic tip of the eroticism
typified by the belly-dancer. Like the great singer herself, belly-dancers
routinely performed in films, theaters, and cabarets, and on the cere-
monial platforms of weddings and other private celebrations in Cairo
Homage to a Belly-Dancer
and Alexandria. Whereas you coul dn' t really enjoy looking at the portly
and severe Um Kalthoum, you coul dn' t do much more t han enjoy
looking at fine belly-dancers, whose first star was the Lebanese-born
Badia Massabni, also an actress, cabaret-owner, and trainer of young
talent. Badia's career as a dancer ended around World War Two, but
her true heir and disciple was Tahia Carioca, who was, I think, the
finest belly-dancer ever. Now seventy-five and living in Cairo, she is still
active as an actress and political militant and, like Um Kalthoum, the
remarkable symbol of a national culture. Um Kal t houm performed at
King Farouk' s wedding in 1936, and the lavish party was also Tahia' s
debut. It gave her a prominence she never lost.
Duri ng her heyday as dancer extraordinaire Tahia Carioca embodied
a very specific ki nd of sexiness, which she rendered as the most smoot h
and understated of dancers, and as a highly visible femme fatale in
Egyptian films. When I looked up the actual number of films she made
between the early forties and 1980 I was able to find 190 titles; when. I
asked her about t hem in Cairo duri ng the spring of 1989, she coul dn' t
remember the exact figure but opi ned t hat t he s um was well over 200.
Most of her early films included at least one dance numberevery
Egyptian film t hat did not pretend to be "high drama" (only a handful
did) had to include a song-and-dance routine. This was a formula
rather like second-act ballets in nineteenth-century-Paris opera perfor-
mances: ballets were put on whether or not they fitted the story. In
Egyptian films an announcer would suddenly appear on screen and
name a singer and dancer; the scene would reveal itself (often gratu-
itously) to be a nightclub or a large living-room; then an orchestra
would strike up t he music, and the performance began.
Tahia did such scenes. But they were no more t han crude short hand
sketches for her full-scale cabaret performances, the only one of which
I actually witnessed I shall forever remember with startling vividness.
It took place in 1950. An enterprising schoolmate had discovered t hat
she was dancing at Badia's open-air casino alongside the Nile in Giza
(today the site of a high-rise Sheraton), tickets were obtained, and four
awkward fourteen-year-olds arrived on the appoi nt ed evening at least
two hours before she was to begin. The daytime-heat of t hat June day
had pretty much dissolved i nt o a balmy, slightly windy evening. By t he
time the lights went down for the star t urn, Badia's was full, all forty
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Homage to a Belly-Dancer
or so tables packed with an entirely Egyptian audience of middle-class
aficionados. Tahia' s partner for the evening was the singer Abdel Aziz
Mahmoud, a stolid-looking, bald gentleman in a white dinner-jacket
who walked out, planted himself on a wood-and-wicker chair in the
middle of the primitive stage, and began to sing to the accompani-
ment of a small takhta, or Arab orchestra, seated off t o one side. The
song was "Mandil-el-Helou" ("A Pretty Handkerchief"), whose innu-
merable verses celebrated t he woman who draped it, cried i nt o it, deer
orated her hair with.it, on and on for al most a full hour.
There were at least fifteen mi nut es of this before Tahia suddenly re-
vealed herself a few feet behi nd t he singer' s chair. We were sitting
about as far from the stage as it was possible to sit, but the shim-
mering, glistening blue costume she wore simply dazzled the eye, so
bright were the sequins and spangles, so controlled was her quite
lengthy immobility as she stood there with an entirely composed look
about her. As in bullfighting, the essence of the classic Arab belly-
dancer' s art i s not how much but how little the artist moves: only the
novices, or the deplorable Greek and American imitators, go in for the
appalling wiggling and j umpi ng around t hat passes for "sexiness" and
harem hootchy-kootch. The poi nt is to make an effect mainly (but by
no means exclusively) t hrough suggestiveness, andin the ki nd of full-
scale composition Tahia offered t hat nightto do so over a series of
episodes kni t t ed together in alternating moods, recurring motifs. For
"Mandil-el-Helou" Tahia' s central mot i f was her relationship to the
largely oblivious Abdel Aziz Mahmoud. She would glide up behi nd
him, as he droned on, appear as if t o fall i nt o his arms, mimic and
mock himall wi t hout ever t ouchi ng hi m or eliciting any response.
Her di aphanous veils were laid over the modified bikini t hat was
basic t o the outfit wi t hout ever becoming its mai n attraction. The
beauty of her dance was its connectedness: the feeling she communi -
cated of a spectacularly lithe and well-shaped body undul at i ng
t hrough a complex but decorative series of encumbrances made up of
gauzes, veils, necklaces, strings of gold and silver chains, which her
movements animated deliberately and at times almost theoretically.
She would stand, for example, and slowly begin to move her right hip,
which would in t ur n activate her silver leggings, and the beads draped
over the right side of her waist. As she did all this, she would look
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Homage to a Belly-Dancer
down at the moving parts, so to speak, and fix our gaze on them roo,
as if we were all watching a separate little drama, rhythmically very
controlled, re-configuring her body so as to highlight her semi-
detached right side. Tahia' s dance was like an extended arabesque elab-
orated around her seated colleague. She never j umped, or bobbed her
breasts, or went in for bumpi ng and grinding. There was a majestic de-
liberateness to the whole thing t hat maintained itself right t hrough
even the quicker passages. Each of us knew t hat we were experiencing
an immensely excitingbecause endlessly deferrederotic experience,
the likes of which we could never, hope to mat ch in real life. And t hat
was precisely the point: this was sexuality as a public event, brilliantly
planned and executed, yet totally unconsummat ed and unrealizable.
Ot her dancers mi ght go in for acrobatics, or slithering about on the
floor, or modified strip-teasing, but not. Tahia, whose grace and ele-
gance suggested something altogether classical and even monument al .
The paradox was t hat she was so immediately sensual and yet so re-
mote, unapproachable, unobtainable. In our severely repressed world
these attributes enhanced .the impression she made. I especially recall
t hat once she started dancing, and cont i nui ng t hrough the rest of her
performance, shej i ad what appeared to be a small self-absorbed-smile
on her face, her mout h open more t han is usual in a smile, as if she was
privately contemplating her body, enjoying its movements. Her smile
mut ed whatever tawdry theatricality attached to the scene and to her
dance, purifying;them by virtue of the concentration bestowed on her
i nnermost and most self-abstracted t hought s. And indeed, as I have
watched her dancing t hrough at least twenty-five or thirty of her films,
I have always found t hat smile, lighting up the usually silly or affected
settinga still point. of the t urni ng world.
That smile has seemed to me symbolic of Tahia' s di st i nct i on in a
cul t ure t hat featured dozens of dancers called Zouzou and Fifi, most
of t hem treated as barely a not ch above prostitutes. This was always
evident dur i ng peri ods of Egyptian prosperity, t he last days of
Farouk, for instance, or when the oil boom br ought wealthy Gulf
Arabs t o Egypt; it was also t r ue when Lebanon was t he Arab world' s
playground, with t housands of girls available for display or hire;
Most belly-dancers would appear in_such circumstances to go to the
highest bidder, the night-club serving as a t emporary shop-window.
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Homage to a Belly-Dancer
The pressures of a conservative Isl ami c, cul t ure were to blame for
this, as were t he di st ort i ons produced by uneven development. To be
a respectably nubile woman was usually to be destined for marriage
wi t hout much t ransi t i on from adolescence; to be young and attrac-
tive has therefore not always been an advantage, since a conventional
father mi ght for t hat very reason arrange a wedding with a "mat ure"
and well-off man. If women di dn' t fall wi t hi n those schemes, they
risked all sort s of oppr obr i um.
Tahia belongs, not to the easily identified culture of B-girls and
fallen women, but to the world of progressive women skirting or un-
blocking the social lanes. She remained organically linked, however, to
her country' s society, because she discovered another, far more inter-
esting role for herself as dancer and entertainer. This was the all-but-
forgotten role of almeh (literally, a learned woman), spoken of by
nineteenth-century European visitors to the Ori ent such as Edward
Lane and Flaubert. The almeh was a courtesan of sorts, but ' a woman
of significant accomplishments. Dancing was only one of her gifts:
others were the ability to sing and recite classical, poetry, to discourse
wittily, to be sought after for her company by men of law, politics, and
literature.
Tahia is referred to as almeh in her best film, one of her earliest, Li'bet
il Sit ("The Lady's Ploy," 1946), which also stars the greatest of
twentieth-century Arab actors and comedians, Naguib el-Rihani, a
formidable combination of Chaplin and Moliere. In the film, Tahia is
a gifted young dancer and wit, used by her rascally parents to ensnare
men of means. Rihani, who plays an unemployed teacher, is fond of
her and she loves him, but she is lured by her parents into a get-rich
scheme involving a wealthy Lebanese. In t he end, Tahia returns to
Rihania rather sentimental conclusion of a kind t hat few of her
ot her films permi t themselves. She performs a short but wonderfully
provocative dance in the film, but t hat is meant to be an almost minor
affair compared to the display of her wit, intelligence, and beauty.
Subsequently Tahia seems to have been fixed by film directors in a
coarser version of this role, which she repeats in film after film. She is
the other woman, a counter to the virtuous, domestically acceptable,
and much less interesting female lead. Even within those limits,
Tahia' s talents shine t hrough. You believe she would be more inter-
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Homage to a Belly-Dancer
\5nngas companion and as sexual partner than the woman who gets
married co che leading man, and you begin to suspect that because she
is so talented and so sexy, she has to be portrayed as a dangerous
womanthe almeh who is too. learned, t oo smart, t oo sexually ad-
vanced, for any man in cont emporary Egypt. By the fifties Tahia had
become the standard woman-as-devil figure in dozens of Egyptian
films. In Shabab lmra\ considered a later classic, she plays the role of a
tough but sexually starved widow who rents a' room to a handsome
count ry bumpki n recently come to Cairo as an Azhar student; she se-
duces and marries him; but when he meets the angelic daught er of a
family friend, he awakens from Tahia' s Circe-like spell, denounces her,
and leaves her for the safe, bori ng younger woman. In an otherwise
undistinguished parable there is one great scene, in which Tahia pulls
her young husband away from a street celebration t hat features a
young belly-dancer who has captivated the inexperienced student.
Tahia takes hi m into their house, sits hi m down, and tells hi m t hat she
will-now show him what real dancing is like. Whereupon she treats
hi m to a private performance t hat positively smoulders, proving t hat ,
middle-aged or not, she still is the finest dancer, the most formidable
intellect, and the most desirable sexual object around.
Like many expatriates for whom Tahia was one of the great sexual
symbols of our yout h, I assumed t hat she would go on danci ng more
or less forever. Consider t he rude shock when, after an absence from
Egypt of fifteen years, I returned there in the summer of 1975 and was
told t hat Cairo' s longest-running dramat ic hi t featured Tahia Carioca
and her newest husbandi Fayek Halawa, who had also written the
play, Yahya al-Wafd ("Hooray for the Delegation"). On my second ni ght
in Cairo I went to the old Ci nema Miami, now an open-air theater, all
excitement and sent i ment al expectation at this rare chance to recover
some part of my all-but-buried youth. The play was an overwhelm-
ingly l ong and vulgar farce about a group of Egyptian villagers who
had a delegation of Soviet agricultural experts foisted on them.
Relentlessly the play exposed the Russians' rigid unpleasantness
(Sadat had thrown out all Russian advisers in 1972) while celebrating
the Egyptians' witty deflation of their schemes. It began at about 9:30,
but I could only endure two-and-a-half hours (i.e., half) of its idiotic
badinage.
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Homage-to a Belly-Dancer
No small part in my disillusionment was what had become of Tahia.
She had the role of the loudest, toughest village woman, whose prize
ram was rented out for breeding purposes (lots of predictable jokes
about sexual potency). But it was her appearance and manner t hat
t ook my breath away. Gone was the tawny seductress, the graceful
dancer who was all elegance and perfectly executed gesture. She had
t urned into a 220-pound swaggering bully; she stood with her hands
on her hips unreeling insults, ut t eri ng the coarsest of one-liners, the
easiest of double-entendres, in an almost unwatchable slapstick style,
all of it at the service of what seemed to be the worst ki nd of oppor-
tunistic pro-Sadat, anti-Nasser politics. This was a period when
Egyptian policy, moving away from the progressive, Third World and
Arab commi t ment s of its post-1954 history under Nasser, was trying to
please Henry Kissinger. It saddened me t hat Tahia and her scrawny
little husband shoul d be involved in this ki nd of thing.
In the fourteen years since t hat trip to Egypt, bits and pieces of in-
formation about Tahia have added .complexity to her portrait. A well-
known Egyptian sociologist told me, for example, t hat duri ng the
forties and fifties she had been very close t o the Communi st Party.
This, he said, was "the radicalization of the belly-dancers." In 1988 I
learned t hat she appeared in Athens as part of a group of Egyptian and
ot her .Arab artists and intellectuals who had signed on to join the
Palestinian ship el-Awda ("Return") in a symbolic reverse-exodus
j ourney back to the Holy Land. After two weeks of one mishap after
anot her the boat was blown up by the Israeli secret service and the pro-
ject abandoned. I later heard t hat Tahia had also emerged as one of the
leaders of a very vocal and politically advanced syndicate of cinema ac-
tors, directors, and photographers. What t hen was the t rut h about the
dancer who was now seventy-five and had attained the position of a se-
nior, almost est abl i shment figure in the post-Sadat cul t ure of late
twentieth-century Egypt?
Through a friend of Tahia's, the document ary film-maker Nabiha
Loutfy, I set up an appoi nt ment to see her. She now lives in a small
apart ment about a block away from where I saw her dance forty years
before. She greeted Nabiha and myself with a solemn dignity I had not
expected. Dressed in austere black, she was very well made-up, her
arms and legs, however, covered in the long sleeves and dark stockings
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Homage to a Belly-Dancer
of the pious Muslim woman. She was slightly less large t han she had
been, and there was no vulgarity. She now communi cat ed a gravity and
authority t hat came from her being much more t han j ust a former
belly-dancer., A living legend perhaps, or a famous sage: the almeh in
semi-retirement. Nabi ha addressed her as Hajja, the Islamic epithet ac-
corded to elderly women who have made the' pilgrimage to Mecca, a
designation reinforced not only by her extremely sober mien but by the
many pictures of Mecca on the wall and by the Koran plainly in view
on a nearby table. As we sat and chatted, her life passed before us in
majestic review.
She came from an Ismailia family long active in politics, and her real
name is Tahia Mohammed Kraiem. Her paternal uncle was killed by
the British, and, she went on proudly, at least three of her family were
nanied Nidal ("Struggle"). Her father had spent time in prisons. She
was somewhat Tartuffian when she described her feelings about
dancinglike being in a temple, she saidbut it was clear as she spoke
t hat she had believed herself to be doing more in her dancing t han en-
ticing men like some common entraineuse. "My life as a dancer has been
beautiful, and I love it," she said with total conviction. Tahia saw her-
selfcorrectly, I believeas part of a major cultural renaissance, a-na-
tionalist revival in t he arts based on t he liberal i ndependence
movement of Saad Zaghloul and his revolution of 1919: the artistic fig-
ures included writers like Naguib Mahfouz, Tawfik al-Hakim, Taha
Hussein, singers like Um Kal t houm and. Abdel Wahhab, actors like
Soleiman Naguib and Rihani. As a young girl she had been t aught by
Badia, who advised her not to hang ar ound night-clubs and bars once
she had performed her number. Wistfully she added t hat she found it
very harcl to learn to use castanets, but finally managed t hanks to
Badia, a woman she spoke of with love and veneration.
As the tea and biscuits were brought out I asked her to talk about her
political life. Her descriptions were extraordinary, as much because I re-
alized for the first time t hat she had always been part of the nationalist
Left (Nasser, she said, had jailed her in the fifties because she had been
a member of the League for Peace, a Moscow front organization) as be-
cause she had so low an opinion of Egypt's present leaders. I asked her
about the awful Yahya al~Wafd. It was considered a Sadatist play, she
said, but she saw it mainly as a play about the Egyptian readiness always
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Homage to a Belly-Dancer
to think of foreigners "as better t han we are." This somewhat uncon-
vincing rationale for what I still t hought an obviously self-serving pro-
Sadat play led her into a diatribe against her former husband, Fayek
Halawa, who, she complained, had dragged her into one disaster after
another. "Why," she asked, "do you t hi nk I live here and not in my
house? He took it and everything in it, including all my pictures and
films, leaving me with nothing at all." Pathos quickly gave way to vivacity
when I asked her about the United States,.which she had visited several
times. Once she had even crossed the country by car, a trip she found
wonderful. "Liked the people, but hate their government' s policy."
For someone who had grown up on Egyptian films wi t hout
knowing much about their background, and for whom Tahia' s
dancing was a rich but relatively unexplored memory, talking with this
venerable old woman was exhilarating. She was a source of informa-
tion on a huge variety of subjects, all of it narrated with warmt h,
humor, and a very attractive irony. At one poi nt her discourse was in-
t errupt ed by the evening call to prayer, broadcast with an ear-splitting
roar from the minaret of a nearby mosque. At once she stopped her-
self, closed her eyes, extended her arms, palms facing upwards, and re-
cited t he Koranic verses along with t he muezzin. The moment t he
prayers were over I burst out with the hopelessly over-determined ques-
tion I had long held within me, perhaps ever since I saw her dance in
1950. "How many times have you .been married, Tahia?" I asked. This
was as close as I could come t o asking her to connect t he sensuality of
her dancing (and t hat incredible smile of hers) with her personal life.
The transformation in her appearance was stunning. She had barely
finished her prayers when, in response t o my question, she sat up
straight, one elbow.cocked provokingly at me, the other arm gesturing
rhetorically in the air. "Many times," she retorted, her voice taking on
the brassiness one associates with a lady of the night. Her eyes and her
tone seemed t o add: "So what? I've known lots of men. " Seeking to get
us out of this little impasse, the ever-solicitous Nabi ha asked her which
of t hem she had loved, which had influenced her. "None at all," she said
harshly. "They were a shabby lot of bastards," a declaration followed by
a string of expletives. Far from t he resignation and det achment of a
prayerful old age, this powerful out burst revealed an individualist and a
fighter. And yet one also felt the romantic-spirit of a person often de-
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Homage to a Belly-Dancer
ceived, who, given a chance, would fall in love again. Tahia' s latest diffi-
culties with a man, the rascally Fayek Halawa, were chronicled in re-
morseless detail. Our sympathies were fully with her, however, as they
were when she and Nabiha took off after a wealthy film distributor who
was trying to manipulate the syndicate. "Ah, men, " she sighed. Her lively
eyes looked at me quizzically.
She knew the patterns and forms of her world, and to a great extent
she had respected them. A dutiful daught er then, a pious older
Muslim now. Yet Tahia was also an emblem of all t hat was unadmi n-
istered, uncontrolled, uncoopt ed in her culture: for such energies the
career of almeh, dancer, and actress nonpareil was a perfect resolution.
You could feel the assurance she had brought to her relation with the
centers of authority, the challenge of a free woman. When I went to the
central cinema archive in Cairo the next day to look for phot ographi c
and written material about her, I found only a shambles, a little apart-
ment downtown with more employees t han work, more vague designs
to chronicle Egypt's rich artistic history t han plans to get the real work
done. Then I saw t hat Tahia was her own history, largely undocu-
ment ed but still magisterially present, and subversive to boot.
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