Rewriting Narratives in Egyptian Theatre

Translation, Performance, Politics

Sirkku Aaltonen, Areeg Ibrahim, Sirkku Aaltonen, Areeg Ibrahim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781032340012
• eBook ISBN: 9781317368267
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Drama

This study of Egyptian theatre and its narrative construction explores the ways representations of Egypt are created of and within theatrical means, from the 19th century to the present day. Essays address the narratives that structure theatrical, textual, and performative representations and the ways the rewriting process has varied in different contexts and at different times. Drawing on concepts from Theatre and Performance Studies, Translation Studies, Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Diaspora Studies, scholars and practitioners from Egypt and the West enter into dialogue with one another, expanding understanding of the different fields. The articles focus on the ways theatre texts and performances change (are rewritten) when crossing borders between different worlds. The concept of rewriting is seen to include translation, transformation, and reconstruction, and the different borders may be cultural and national, between languages and dramaturgies, or borders that are present in people's everyday lives. Essays consider how rewritings and performances cross borders from one culture, nation, country, and language to another. They also study the process of rewriting, the resulting representations of foreign plays on stage, and representations of the Egyptian revolution on stage and in Tahrir Square. This assessment of the relationship between theatre practices, exchanges, and rewritings in Egyptian theatre brings vital coverage to an undervisited area and will be of interest to developments in theatre translation and beyond.

Part I
Intercultural Rewriting

Our theoretical framework, which we have outlined in the Introduction, consists of the concepts of rewriting, representation, and narrative, which have been defined there. In the current section, the concept of narrative will be expanded within the framework of studying the movement of theatrical events and drama across national and cultural borders. “Intercultural Rewriting” for our purposes thus entails the ways in which two different cultures engage, communicate, and exchange. Lo and Gilbert support this position, for them, intercultural “suggests an exploration of the interstice between cultures.”¹ The chapters in this section examine these areas of intersection between Egypt and its earlier colonial powers (Europe, or more specifically, Britain and France) or present-day hegemonic power (America). Moreover, interculturalism for our purposes is examined as the two-way process not just controlled by the West, in agreement with Bharucha’s postulates.² This is also supported by Lo and Gilbert, who maintain, “[i]n our model, intercultural exchange is represented as a two-way flow. Both partners are considered cultural sources while the target culture is positioned along the continuum between them.”³

Our framework in this book will be complemented with two more paradigms from Translation Studies. These will help to understand both the selection of materials to represent the theatre of the Other, the Egyptian theatre in the West, the drama of the former colonisers in Egypt, and the possible reasons for the construction of a particular type of representation of the material that would have been available. The two paradigms for explaining the factors that have had, and continue to have, an impact on cultural transfer have been outlined by André Lefevere (1992) and Gideon Toury (1995),⁴ whose models emphasize the extratextual factors that decide on what texts and playwrights get chosen for rewriting, and through that, introduced into a new theatrical (or literary) system to construct a particular representation. Selectivity is the common denominator of the chapters in the current section: Sirkku Aaltonen compares the (master) narratives in four historiographies of Egyptian theatre; Areeg Ibrahim’s topic covers the internal and external selection of Egyptian drama for rewriting in/for the West; Marvin Carlson discusses the reasons for the choice of the playwright Tawfīq al-Ḥākīm to represent Egyptian/Arab drama in the West; and Dalia Basiouny, as a theatre practitioner, describes her selection of materials for her play Solitaire. All chapters illustrate the way selective appropriation works to choose and prioritize the material to support a particular point, theme, or central subject of the narrative.⁵

According to Lefevere,⁶ there is a double control factor, which decides on the suitability of foreign cultural products. The first factor, which aims to control the literary system from the inside within the parameters set up by the second, includes professionals, such as critics, reviewers, teachers, and the translators, who will rewrite the artworks until they are deemed acceptable to the poetics and ideology of a certain time and place. The suitability of a foreign product can also be explored in relation to one or several aspects of the context, which can, according to Thomas Postlewait,⁷ be divided into agency (those involved in contributing to the mise-en-scene, artistic heritage (theatrical traditions and conventions), audiences/reception, and the social world. In applying Lefevere’s concept of agency, professionals played a significant role in turning Tawfīq al-Ḥākīm into the epitome of Arab theatre. Marvin Carlson identifies here two groups of professionals, a number of leading figures in the French intellectual and theatrical world, as well as several key Orientalists. The second factor is patronage, which is usually more interested in the ideology and delegates the power to decide on the poetics to the professionals. Areeg Ibrahim also identified the professionals as the ones making decisions when selecting which representative Arabic plays to translate into English.

As a rule, patrons (e.g. publishers and theatres in the present study) operate by means of institutions set up to regulate at least the distribution of foreign cultural products. These may consist of academies, the mainstream theatrical establishments (in this study), censorship bureaux, critical journals, and the educational establishment. This is illuminated well by both Carlson and Basiouny. In Carlson’s chapter, the patrons included a critical journal, which published a translation of al-Ḥākīm’s play, while Basiouny’s play became rejected by the patrons of two theatre festivals. Patronage consists of three interacting elements, an ideological component, which governs the choice and development of both form and content (in Basiouny’s case, this was the major factor for rejection); an economic component, which means the economic system of reward; and finally the element of status, which grants the integration into a particular group, a kind of elité (al-Ḥākīm’s reward). Naturally the elements can all be differentiated; for example, economic success does not necessarily guarantee prestige.

Gideon Toury’s paradigm is based on norms that control the way that representations are rewritten. According to Toury,⁸ norms control the rewriting process on several levels. The initial norm determines the translator’s adherence to either the source text norms or those prevalent in the target literature/theatre. Preliminary norms are related to the existence and nature of a particular translation policy or “factors that govern the choice of text-types, or even of individual texts, to be imported through translation into a particular culture/language at a particular point in time. Such a policy will be said to exist inasmuch as the choice is found to be non-random.”

Different policies may of course apply to different subgroups (the choice of Basiouny’s play to the festivals in the first instance) as well as the directness of translation directly from the source language or via another language (al-Ḥākīm’s plays were first translated into English from French). These two considerations are often interconnected. Operational norms guide the “decisions made during the act of translation itself” and can be divided into matricial norms and textual-linguistic norms. The former decide on “the extent to which omissions, additions, changes of location and manipulations of segmentation are referred to in the translated texts (or around them).” For instance, Basiouny changed the language and elements of her play according to the locales and audiences. On the other hand, the latter, textual-linguistic norms, “govern the selection of material to formulate the target text in, or replace the original textual and linguistic material with” and also present in Basiouny’s rewritings of her play. Toury has further determined the sociocultural constraints according to their potency and placed them on a scale from rules through norms into idiosyncracies.

The motivation for selection is never simply an interest in other worlds or realities, but only where we can see the Self in the Other. The motivations for rewritings in translation can include the fame and status of a playwright (of canonical writers in the theatre, we could name Shakespeare or Molière in the West), the style of writing s/he represents (Tawfīq al-Ḥākīm’s familiarity with the French theatrical system as well as the echoes of French symbolism in his early work), the accessibility of the language of the original (for example, of Egyptian Lenīn El Ramlī, whose work is far less known in the West than its merits would justify, whereas Ḥākīm’s drama came into English through French, or modifications that are made for a performance as was the case with Dalia Basiouny’s Solitaire), and the prestige of a particular culture that is often interwoven with their economic status (the status of the Western drama of the colonisers of Egypt) etc. The transfer of cultural representations is carefully monitored in two respects: the mainstream theatres are interested in rewritings that already have an established status in the receiving culture, or they can be rewritten in such a way as to bring them into line with the socio-ideological narratives of the receiver. This applies, to a great extent, to hegemonic and self-sufficient countries such as England, France, and the US. In general, foreign plays must already have a recognizable amount of the Self even if they were, on the surface, of the Other. As Louise Ladouceur⁹ has explained it, “[a dramatic work is] intended for a given community at a given moment in its history, it is bound to be rooted in a specific social, cultural and political context.” When the community changes, the text changes as well. Dalia Basiouny has described the changes she has made in her plays as they have been produced in new locales and to new audiences. As subcultures, theatre enthusiasts, activist groups, or theatre festivals are often welcomed pockets for alternative representations or resistance. Resistance can also come in disguise: a representation that appears to concern someone else, somewhere else, can in fact be very close to home (many Shakespeare plays at their own time or ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I Intercultural Rewriting
• PART II Interlingual Rewriting
• PART III Intercontextual Rewriting
• PART IV Intermedial Rewriting
• Afterword
• List of Contributors
• Index