Sitting on the beach I have a good heart-to-heart with my mother on the phone. It mirrors a conversation that Samir and I have been having continuously over the past months. My mom asks me the question that most people in my circles do when I tell them about our project: who are you, two Europeans, to be creating this piece in Egypt? I have always fully encouraged this question. This critical stance is absolutely essential. Which is why I have been asking myself the same question from the very beginning of our project. And way before, as questions like these were the backbone of my master studies in cultural anthropology.
I’m always hesitant to use the word ‘anthropology’. I despise its colonial history, the way that anthropology has been used as a way to legitimize racism. Going to a faraway land, studying the way people act, and writing down ‘how they do it there’ – there being in Egypt or anywhere else, preferably non-Western. To emphasize how different ‘they’ are from ‘us’. This kind of writing may be entertaining as a letter to your family, but it has no use as a science. Because ‘they’ over there, they have their own voices. Why should I be explaining how ‘they’ act and think? They can tell you themselves!
So in extension of that: why should I be making a performance about women’s lives here? Who am I to decide what they live like, and who am I to criticize or judge the norms of their society?
The thing is, contemporary anthropology, when done well, is exactly about this: giving voice. Not imposing your own. Collecting voices, connecting them, creating a context that amplifies individual voices by including them into something larger.
In the text of our performance, nothing has been made up. All of the text originates from interviews with Egyptian women and has been minimally adapted. Of course, I have made selections, I have chosen to include some details and take out others. I have put together these specific parts of these specific stories. I have done so in an attempt to show something, to reveal something that normally is taken too much for granted to be noticed. To show connections and patterns that make each individual story so much more relevant in relation to the larger society. Because these individual stories, when put next to each other, reveal things that on their own they would not. Put together, they are no longer about one individual women’s struggles and strengths, but they highlight something present in all of the women we spoke to. Similar obstacles they face in life, but also a similarity in possesssing each of them a certain strength, combined with flexibility. An individual willpower paired with a sensibility to community. A readiness to challenge norms and expectations while prioritizing the protection of themselves and their loved ones. Enfin, I will leave it up to the audience to decide what these stories, when put together on stage, come to represent for them. I have also tried to show the differences and nuances between each story. They’re as interesting as the connections. Because ‘women’ are not a single category!
I invite anyone to assume a critical stance towards the decisions made in the script. Because I know very well there are things that as an outsider I will never understand. Our dancers are usually the first ones to confront me with that. Because even if everything that’s said in the show stems from real interviews, the risk of misinterpretation or wrongful rephrasing is always there. Our wonderful dancers are always there to point out to me that “we would never say that this way”. This has sometimes been challenging, because how am I to know whether we are dealing with a difference in character or a mistake in interpretation? After all, sometimes the woman in the interview did say it literally this way, as surprising as this may be to the dancers who don’t recognize themselves in this way of speaking. But at the same time I have to accept that what’s said in English in an interview to a foreign researcher like me, will not always feel natural to say on stage in Arabic to a local audience. It may not carry the same meaning in that context.
Sometimes even when taking literal quotes from our interviews, the dancers would point out that “what you think is the main argument of this story, will not be interpreted like that by the audience”. This is why my collaboration with the dancers and with translator Mariam Dahab goes way beyond linguistic translation, and includes what I like to call ‘cultural translation’. Making sure that I understand not just what is being said but what is underneath. And vice versa: that the story told on stage fits the language but also the cultural frame of reference, the background and the expectations of the audience. So that they will understand the text and subtext, the full range of emotions included.
Throughout the process I have thus done my best to invite criticism, to be open to have my interpretations challenged time after time. At the same time I have tried to foster trust that despite being a foreigner, I have a capacity to understand more than one would initially think. Precisely because I am aware of the limits of my understanding, shaped by having grown up someplace very different. Precisely because I keep researching, questioning, reopening the debate. This has not always been easy. To find out after a lot of work that you still missed the point, or communicated it wrongly, is confronting. To have each of your enthusiastic attempts to write something relevant met with criticism and suspicion (again, rightfully so!) is a challenge to the ego. I had to remind myself every time to stay flexible and open, rather than becoming defensive and trying to prove my own intellectual abilities.
In the end I can only thank our team for trusting my efforts, for being patient with me, for going out of their way to keep explaining things to me. I would not say that I was the best person to do this job. There are probably local Egyptian women who would have done it better.
But I do believe that at times, my outsider’s perspective may have clarified or illuminated some details that our research participants themselves may have overlooked. That I may have focused on things that are ‘too normal’ for them to notice. Sometimes that has a negative impact, as it forces the creation of a narrative that is not there in reality. But sometimes there may be value in highlighting these hidden assumptions behind our everyday life, asking questions about them to open up surprising (self)-reflections. I know that I have been led to interesting realizations about the society I grew up in, exactly because of the observations and questions of tourists or newcomers.
And I know that I learned tremendously from this working process – about the lives of our research participants, about myself and my own presumptions, and about so much more than I can currently express. Please allow me to process for a while. In the meantime, come see the show with your own (critical) eyes.