Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, and Politics

3. Nationalist Iconography

chapter three Nationalist Iconography A nation is an abstraction. That is, it has no material form. Yet ever since the rise of nationalism, the nation has been represented visually. The nation is thus an “imagined community” that is sometimes imagined in human form.1 The purposes of this iconography are clear: images of the nation were meant to reaffirm the unity of the collective and give the concept of nationhood greater immediacy. In societies such as those of the Middle East, they were also meant to disseminate the idea of nationalism to broad segments of the population who remained illiterate. When the nation was personified, it appeared as either a male or female figure, with the latter predominating. The selection and subsequent attributes associated with the chosen figure give insight into a particular nationalist movement and its ideal of the nation. Egypt (Misr) or the Egyptian nation (al-umma al-Misriyya)—both the territory and the collective—came over time and with few exceptions to be depicted as a woman.2 Explanations of why this is so vary. A folkloric practice of thinking of the nation as a woman (Bahiyya) might have influenced artists, but the nationalists could have broken with this tradition . Both Misr and umma are feminine nouns, yet artists could have depicted al-watan (homeland), a masculine noun, instead. The idea of representing the nation as a woman, like the idea of nationalism itself, might have come from abroad. Derived from the European model in general or the French republican precedent (Marianne) in particular, it would be one more example of an almost universal practice.3 Yet there were 57 important exceptions; some nations were rendered as male—England’s John Bull and the United States’s Uncle Sam, for example—or had both male and female icons.4 But perhaps the question of why Egypt was depicted as a woman is not so important as the process by which this occurred, what sort of woman was chosen, and what these images ultimately tell us about race, class, and gender in Egypt. Significant obstacles existed to representing the Egyptian nation as a woman, most notably the fact that until the early 1920s, most elite women did not expose their faces in public. This chapter considers the context of creation of visual representations of the Egyptian nation, their intended meanings, and their reception by Egyptian audiences. Egyptian iconography was generated under diverse circumstances by a variety of artists and others for multiple audiences. Often it was to memorialize moments, movements, or particular men, and was tied to collective memory . The implicit argument is that nationalist iconography would have reached a broad segment of the population, in part through photographic reproductions, and operated on a visceral level. early cartoons Some of the earliest images of the Egyptian nation came from the pen of Ya‘qub Sanu‘a, a nationalist educated in part in Italy and invariably influenced by the arts there. Sanu‘a was a man of many talents. In the early 1870s, he wrote and produced plays, and he is credited with founding native Egyptian theater. In 1877, he started a satirical weekly called Abu Naddara Zarqa’ (The Man with the Blue Glasses). Only fifteen issues of the handwritten journal appeared before an angry Khedive Ismail expelled Sanu‘a from Egypt. Sanu‘a then took up residence in Paris, where he continued to produce his journal under various titles for decades, adding French to the colloquial Arabic.5 Sanu‘a’s journal circulated widely in its early days according to contemporary observers. Blanchard Jerrold wrote that the satire in the second issue “was so thoroughly to the taste of the public, that the paper was sold in immense quantities. It was in every barrack, in every Government-office. In every town and village it was read with the liveliest delight.” Jerrold claimed that the journal subsequently “found its way into every village, and was read universally.” If they could not read, he explained, the fellah “learned to listen with delight to the satire of the Abou Naddarah.”6 After his exile, Sanu‘a had the banned journal smuggled back into Egypt: copies were hidden in the pages of art books and large journals or in the luggage 58 Images of the Nation of Egyptian travelers (with one poor woman carrying the journal home in her bedding).7 It is hard to know how many people read...