Latifa al-Zayyat

Latifa al-Zayyat

Latifa al-Zayyat (8 August 1923 – 10 September 1996) was an Egyptian activist and writer, most famous for her novel The Open Door, which won the inaugural Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature.

Quotes

• In the novel, I aimed at crystallizing three levels of significance. The first one deals with the development of the female protagonist, and its related to the second which deals with developments in Egypt at that period. As for the third level, it incorporates a commentary on the values of the middle class and its practices and how they prevent the country from a take off.

Hamlat Taftīsh: Awrāq Shakhṣiyya (1992 memoir)

Translated from the original Arabic into English by Sophie Bennett with the title The Search: Personal Papers (1996)

• I trembled with feelings of powerlessness, of misery, of oppression, as the bullets of the police killed fourteen demonstrators that day. I screamed for my inability to act, I screamed for my inability to go down to the street to stop the bullets from coming out of the black guns. I shed the child in me and the young woman came of age — prematurely — for I encountered knowledge that went beyond the home to include all of the homeland. My future fate was decided at that moment.

al-Bāb al-Maftūḥ (1960 novel)

Translated from the original Arabic into English by Marilyn Booth with the title The Open Door (2000)

• February 21, 1946. Seven o'clock in the evening: the tranquil sky bore a pleasant coolness, and there was a clean purity to the air as if the heavens had poured down rain and washed the earth. Yet Cairo was not its normal, brightly lit self; its main streets were not choked with the usual crowds streaming through the cinema houses, shops, and cafes, or congregating at bus and tramway stops. The cinema houses were on strike, and so were other businesses, and no buses or trams were running. Police cars and vans slunk along streets packed with rifle-bearing soldiers. The few civilians in sight walked slowly in the streets or stood at intersections, knots of two, three, or four engaged in conversation. One could hear all sorts of dialects and levels of education in their speech, but every exchange turned upon the same subject, that morning's events in Ismailiya Square. (beginning of Chapter One)

• There had been a time when she had regarded Gamila with a touch of disdain. She had considered herself stronger than Gamila, than her aunt, than her father—and stronger than their beliefs, their rules, their traditions. She had laughed with a certain superiority when her mother had said, "The one who knows the fundamentals does not suffer." Yes. She had existed for a time in the shadow of this silly illusion. But in truth it was she who was silly, trivial, conceited, and despicable. She was the doormat beneath people's soles. (Chapter Nine)

• I love you, and I want you to love me. But I do not want you to lose yourself in me, or in anyone. Nor do I want you to draw your self-confidence and your trust in life from me or from anyone else. I want you to have your own individual, independent self, and the confidence that can only spring from the self, not from others. Then -When you have achieved that - no one will ever be able to crush you. (Chapter Fourteen)

• With a final glance at the dark room in which she had been held, she walked forward, light welling up around her, afraid of no one, returning the blows that came her way, and then walking on.... (Chapter Fourteen)

• "One moment, please." [he] said. "There is a small matter to which I want to draw your attention before you leave." Layla faced him, staying near the door. He stood up, gazing down at her for a moment before speaking. "Many people call themselves intellectuals yet mock and belittle the principles and traditions that are ours. But you must realize that these fundamentals are what bind us to the land. Without them we would be like a tree without roots-the slightest breeze could sway it, and even knock it to the ground." (Chapter Sixteen)

• Time passed. And time blunts the sharp edges of our experiences, and attenuates the threads that bind us to them, day by day, so that the most wounding of events becomes ordinary, indistinguishable almost, part of what defines daily life, to be embraced rather than pushed away. (Chapter Twenty-Two)

• The streets of Port Said were packed with people, colliding waves, as if all its homes had emptied themselves, tossing the inhabitants into the street, wave after wave, to blend into a turbulent human sea. People laughed, or wept without knowing what sort of tears these were. Were they tears of joy at their rescue? Or tears of the painful memories that suddenly came to the surface on evacuation day? Or tears that gazed into a better future? (Chapter Thirty)

• [about a monument for Ferdinand de Lesseps] It was a symbol of the ages of slavery and colonialism that they had inherited, a symbol that pulled them back into a loathsome past, that put a barrier between them and a finer future. That symbol must be shattered. (Chapter Thirty)

• [She] yelled, "Rules! We must follow the fundamentals!" Then she corrected herself. "The foundation - that is what is important." (Chapter Thirty)

• [She] dropped her arms and felt a lovely peacefulness creeping into her body, a tranquility more lovely and deeper than the bubbly happiness that had filled her. She looked at [him] and smiled. She took a step, [his] eyes never leaving her. No, it was not the same glow as before. It was new. There had been that flash of light that had gone out, the sun on an overcast day. This was quiet and warm and steady, a light that emanated from within. (Chapter Thirty)

Quotes about

• In my initial meetings with Latifa al-Zayyat, her laughter brought me up short. The woman was always surprising me with her continuous, sometimes abrupt, and loud laughter; and then she no longer surprised me — I got used to and grew to love both Latifa herself and her laughter. She was constantly laughing, but when she told me about her experience in prison, she laughed even more. … Latifa al-Zayyat would laugh at herself and at her comrades in the cell as she told the story, so that the whole subject seemed like a comic play — no, not black comedy, despite the darkness of the experience, but rather a marvelous comedy that redeems the tale of stark realities by cleansing it of the blemish of fear, of bitterness, of petty grudges. What remains is the lightness and transparency of the story, as well as the capacity of human beings to overcome adversity with humor.
  • Radwa Ashour, Spectres. Translation into English by Barbara Romaine quoted here

• In my childhood, the name 'Latifa al-Zayyat' echoed around me as one of the icons of national liberation. The great writer remained in my imagination merely a name, until the film version of The Open Door came out. Our home witnessed many conversations about the boldness of its themes. The adults re-read the novel. and began to discuss it. What arrested them was not the point that choosing the way one lives privately is inseparable from public commitment, but rather the courageous conclusions that emerge through the dialogues. For conversations between the heroine and her female cousin hint that a woman's body becomes parched when her relationship with a man is unsatisfying. This might appear obvious to us now, but at that time it was startling and provocative. The women around me were quietly thankful to this woman who had been able to express an experience that they could not articulate out loud though it was common among them. Thus, The Open Door did not simply broach a single signification; it sparked heated debate in many homes, among mine - just an ordinary home in Cairo.
  • Hala El Badri, quoted in Marilyn Booth's introduction to The Open Door. From "a reminiscence (al-Bahrawi, ed., 1996) offered to a conference on al-Zayyat held shortly before her death in 1996."

• what was startling and bold when The Open Door-novel and movie-emerged may be obvious now, for the transformations in girls' and women's lives that al-Zayyat and others struggled to institute then have become part of contemporary history. And the intensely melodramatic quality of the text may temper its power for readers of the new millennium. Yet we should not dismiss this novel. It was an historically important event; it remains a timely literary work. For in an environment of increasing conservatism, in a global situation where women's rights to choose their own futures become touchstones for issues of all sorts, those transformations begin to look tenuous, and the social and political struggles that al-Zayyat and other independent-minded, courageous writers have made part of their fictional worlds are indeed not entirely a thing of the past.
  • Marilyn Booth, from her introduction to The Open Door

• A great anticolonialist work in a feminist key.
  • Ferial Ghazoul, used as blurb for The Open Door

• Latifa al-Zayyat greatly helped all of us Egyptian writers in our early writing careers.
  • Naguib Mahfouz, used as blurb for The Open Door

• Not only a great novel but a literary landmark that shaped our consciousness.
  • Abdel Moneim Tallima, used as blurb for The Open Door

External links

• Goodreads page