Women and Power in the Middle East

Women on Women: Television Feminism and Village Lives

Women on Women: Television Feminism and Village Lives Lila Abu-Lughod In January 1996, when I returned for a short visit to the Upper Egyptian village I had been working in for a number of years, I watched, with friends, some episodes of the current television serial, Mothers in the House of Love. Set in a retirement home for women, the episodes unfolded the stories of each of the residents, showing how they had ended up there (some tricked into it so their share of an inheritance could be stolen by a brother driven by his greedy wife, some to escape unpleasant daughters-in-law). The central drama concerned the attempt by the unscrupulous brother-in-law of the widow who ran the place to take it over so he could achieve his dream of building a twenty-two-story hotel. Armed with a newfound purpose, the women residents banded together to defend their threatened home. They forgot their squabbles about which television programs to watch, mobilized their talents to raise the money to buy out his share, and stood up to him. The serial had been written a few years earlier by Fathiyya al-¿Assal, a vibrant and self-confident writer and one of only a handful of women of her generation writing television dramas. Active in the Egyptian leftist party, she had occasionally been jailed and had had numerous story ideas tabled and serials cut by the television censors—civil servants working for state-owned television—and even by those higher up in government. Her serials were known for their social concerns, and she considered women’s issues critical. How did al-¿Assal’s serial, and others like it, relate to the lives of women in this Upper Egyptian village? In a region of Egypt considered ‘‘peripheral’’ these women live in a village that might look atypical: set in and among the Pharaonic tem- 104 LILA ABU-LUGHOD Figure 1. Fathiyya al-¿Assal. Photo: Lila Abu-Lughod. ples of ancient Thebes, it has been the base for numerous foreign archaeologists , folklorists, and writers. But in being a mix of mudbrick homes and new cement and brick structures, in having television sets in every house, men with experience as migrants, and households whose meager incomes derive from a combination of wage labor and farming, it is by no means unique in TELEVISION FEMINISM AND WOMEN’S LIVES 105 Figure 2. Women’s literacy class, rural Upper Egypt, 1996. Photo: Lila Abu-Lughod. Egypt. Nor is the village women’s exposure to foreign and urban worlds and lives, especially through television, unusual. Television, in Egypt monopolized until only a few years ago by statecontrolled broadcasting, is particularly useful to examine because this is a crucial place where village women and urban intellectuals meet. What happens in that encounter? How well do they speak to each other? What problems do socially concerned television producers face when they aspire, as does al-¿Assal, to social reform? What do Egyptian feminists, by and large urban, professional, and upper middle class, have to offer to village women? Love and Marriage I watched several episodes of Mothers in the House of Love with my village neighbors, who, though intrigued, kept up a running commentary, laughing at ludicrous characters like the compulsive knitter of pullovers. After an episode in which a sixty-year-old widow had finally consented to marry an old sweetheart , one person joked, ‘‘Now all sixty-year-old women will want to marry.’’ 106 LILA ABU-LUGHOD The next day, though, Zaynab, another woman I knew well, commented more realistically on this episode.1 She simply contrasted it to local attitudes. ‘‘We say when a girl is past thirty she won’t marry. . . . It is shameful. If a woman over thirty does marry, she’ll do it quietly, far away, without a wedding celebration.’’ Zaynab’s comment was revealing in so many ways. Directed to me, it posited the difference between the villagers (and Upper Egyptians in general, by extension) and the urban, wealthy Alexandrian women of the television serial as a cultural difference within a moral frame. The construction of difference was partly for the edification of the anthropologist. Zaynab’s long years of watching her mother’s wealth of funeral laments being carefully noted down by a Canadian folklorist, and her regular experience of being photographed by visiting tourists, had no doubt helped her objectify her own...