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Three Egyptian Retellings of the Denshawai Incident Seth Thomas
In accordance with the requirements of the Hanna & Wardah Sbait Scholarship for Improvised-Sung Poetry & Folk Songs
Portland State University Department of World Languages & Literatures Arabic Section: Langauges, Literature & Culture
All Rights Reserved Š Seth Thomas
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Contents: Introduction.................................................................................................................................3 Tok Tok Magazine.......................................................................................................................5 Poems and Songs Inspired by the Denshawai Incident........................................................10 Conclusion...................................................................................................................................16 Words Cited.................................................................................................................................19
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Introduction The Denshawai Incident, haditha denshawai, has become a modern parable for Egyptian nationalism. In 1906, five British officers shot domesticated pigeons in the Nile Delta village of Denshawai for sport. A scuffle began between several villagers and the officers, resulting in the shooting of an Egyptian woman. One British officer ran from the fight and, collapsing most likely from heatstroke and a concussion, was found by a villager who was then falsely accused of murder and killed on the spot. More official and bureaucratic punishments were carried out in the following days, including jail sentences, hard labor, lashings and four public hangings (Luke 278-279). !
The physical violence alone does not explain why this specific episode of
imperial violence has been a consistent source of artistic and political inspiration in Egypt until today. England’s colonial adventures were bloody, whether behind the scenes with protectorates and mandates or on the grander stages of invasion and occupation. “Within two days,” writes Timothy Mitchell in Colonising Egypt, “most of Alexandria was turned to rubble and ash” during British bombardment in 1882, purposefully demonstrating to “an ‘Eastern population’” the efficacy and superiority of British military technology (129). Yet the gunshots fired in the small village of Denshawai continue to resonate today as loudly, if not more loudly, than the leveling of a major city. It is precisely the small scale of the Denshawai Incident, coupled with the inordinately violent response of Egyptian, Ottoman and British authorities, that gives it
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such staying power and artistic malleability. Indeed, “this incident, like no other, stimulated Egyptian nationalist feelings” (Abi-Hamad 11). !
Egyptian cartoonist Makhlouf published his retelling of the Denshawai Incident
in the new alternative comics magazine Tok Tok in November 2012, close to two years after the start of the storied protest movement in Tahrir Square and halfway through Mohamed Morsi’s shortened presidential term. That same month, Morsi famously issued a decree freeing his decisions from any judicial oversight, sparking more characteristically massive protests in downtown Cairo. The context within which Makhlouf published his rendition may have been unique in Egypt’s history, but the retelling of haditha denshawai has become an artistic tradition in Egypt. This essay will closely examine Makhlouf’s comic, titled Hat Al-Hamam, its use of colloquial Egyptian Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic and English and its drawing style, as well as Tok Tok, the alternative Egyptian comics magazine that published it. In the process this essay will compare Hat al-Hamam’s context and content to pop star Mohamed Mounir’s Denshawai from the 1970s, and Salah Abdel Sabour’s 1956 poem The Hanging of Zahran, and why the Denshawai Incident still has such potency in Egypt today.
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Fig. 1: The shooting of Zahran’s wife from Hat al-Hamam. Notice the use of English in the first panel.
Fig. 2: Opening scene of an earlier comic in the same issue, Inta Hurr (You are Free). By Tawfik.
Tok Tok Magazine !
Founded by artists going by the names of Shennawy, Makhlouf, Andeel, Hicham
Rahmah and Tawfik, Tok Tok launched on January 9th, 2011 (Evans, Egypt Independent). Two weeks later, on January 25th, thousands of protestors gathered in Tahrir Square, leading to the removal of President Hosni Mubarak by the military after three decades of rule. However coincidental the timing, it is fitting given the risque nature of the comics in Tok Tok; subject matter that is often censored from other forms of entertainment, including nudity, scenes depicting couples in bed, drug use and foul language, is regularly printed in the quarterly.
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Tok Tok takes its name from the tiny three wheeled taxis (or rickshaws) that are
ubiquitous in some parts of Cairo, emphasizing the magazine’s decidedly urban focus. Each issue features fantastically illustrated cityscapes that capture, with both a loving hand and a critical eye, a city famous for its noises, traffic, styles of architecture and dress. Panels are filled with buildings and people, business signs and scooters fitting entire families weaving through street vendors trash collectors, the zabaleen. All stories are written in Arabic, often with a combination of Modern Standard Arabic, or fusha, and the colloquial Cairene dialect, ‘amiyya. Makhlouf’s retelling of the Denshawai Incident, Hat al-Hamam, simultaneously embraces and breaks from these traditions. !
Set in Denshawai in 1906, Makhlouf depicts the pigeon hunting and the fight
between the filahin and the British officers. He leaves the panel backgrounds mostly empty, emphasizing the rural setting (fig. 1). This contrasts starkly with comics in the same issue where the buildings become extensions of the characters, if not characters themselves (fig. 2). Figure 1, which is page seven out of seventeen, is a pivotal scene in the story: Zahran notices the pigeon hunt while performing the call to prayer and, after arguing with the officers along with his wife, Zahran wrestles for control of the gun and his wife is shot in the scuffle. In the bottom row of panels, we see the stunned faces of the officer and Zahran before we see Zahran’s wife with the same exes for eyes as a pigeon shot earlier in the comic. Here the story implies that Zahran’s wife died as a result of the gunshot, whereas most retellings state she was injured. The pigeon in
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between Zahran’s panel and his wife’s is a stylistic choice repeated by Makhlouf, most effectively at the end of the story, to remind the reader of the original targets of the British bullets, highlighting the absurdity of the human violence that resulted. !
As seen in figure 1, the comic makes use of a fair bit of English. In fact, the
majority of the dialogue in the first three pages is in English, albeit mostly short outbursts that the reader doesn’t need to comprehend to understand the the storyline. However, No other Tok Tok comic published to this point contained so much English. The use of English is not so surprising, though, given the cosmopolitan and international background of both the magazine itself and the cartoonist. The second issue, published in April 2011, includes a two page spread of drawings that were requested by the now infamous French satirical comics magazine Charlie Hebdo. The drawings consist of Coptic Christians and Muslims protesting in solidarity, protestors holding Facebook shaped ‘weapons’ pointed at the army, and one of Hosni Mubarak in just his underwear, a reference to “the emperor has no clothes.” In the wake of the January 2015 massacre of Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, Makhlouf and fellow cartoonist Anwar, published an article in the major Egyptian newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm (where both have worked as political cartoonists), vigorously defending the French magazine and condemning the attacks. It “wasn’t well received” (Guyer). !
Returning to the comic’s linguistics, Hat al-Hamam is an excellent representation
of Arabic’s well-known diglossia. The narration uses fusha, the dialect of Modern
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Fig. 3. From page 2. Translation of the Arabic: Major Coffin went out with Captain Paul to practice his hobby of hunting pigeons.
(For an entertaining but not necessarily academic discussion on the possible origins of the archaic swear word “"س#$%&”ا, see this forum: http://forums.fatakat.com/ thread1075198)
Fig. 4. From page 5. Translation of the Arabic: Panel 1: BANG BANG Panel 2: You son of a bitch! Panel 3: What are you doing here, sir?! Panel 4: Hunt somewhere else, my brother... Panel 5: Shut up, peasant!
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Standard Arabic reserved primarily for writing and formal speeches, while the dialogue among Egyptians takes place in their colloquial dialect, ‘amiyya. When the British soldiers do speak Arabic, it is almost always in the imperative form giving orders to the residents of Denshawai, or their dialogue is even transliterated into English to emphasize the foreignness of the soldier’s accent, as seen in figure 4. !
And we see the diglossia represented within the dialogue of the Egyptian
characters, too, as in figure 5. After Zahran has righteously punched one of the offending officers, Makhlouf draws a simultaneously tender and ironic panel with Zahran striking a proto-Nasser nationalist pose. And like Nasser (and indeed political discourse in the region in general), Zahran makes use of semantic repetition, heightening the sense that he is giving a speech. In both speech bubbles he begins his points “wa idha kanit...”, leading into “lazem t’arrifu inna...” before concluding with the very emphatic, and very colloquial, “mish.” While none of the words used in figure 5 are purely fusha, some of the terms (such as “idha”) are less common in colloquial. “Mish”, on the the hand, is never used in fusha. Nasser would take advantage of Arabic’s diglossia and switch to colloquial Egyptian phrases in order to “establish intimacy with his audience” (Shunnaq 213). Shunnaq argues that a translation of Nasser’s speeches, or one like Zahran’s, that “fails to have the impact the expression had in Arabic” are not accurate translations (214). Therefore, one could feasibly translate Zahran’s “mish” as
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something more like “ain’t” in English; however, I have opted to avoid this kind of cultural transplantation and translated “mish” as, perhaps blandly, “not.” !
Makhlouf’s handwriting also emphasizes Arabic’s diglossia by means of heavily
stylized handwriting for the dialogue and sound effects and a more reserved, though still clearly hand written, form for the narration. Besides the discerning of fusha and ‘amiyya vocabulary, a foreign reader must carefully follow the magazine’s calligraphyesque lines of narrative and dialogue. One gets the impression that Makhlouf and the other Tok Tok artists have been influenced by the political graffiti that enveloped Tahrir Square during the protests, perhaps the most potent artistic symbol of the revolution. Though typed comics appear regularly in the magazine, they much rarer and, like typed newspapers or novels, are usually in fusha.
Poems and Songs Inspired by the Denshawai Incident !
Hat al-Hamam is far from the first artistic retelling of haditha denshawai. Published
in 1956, Salah Abdel Sabour’s poem The Hanging of Zahran, Shanq Zahran in Arabic, also focuses on Zahran’s experiences. Where Hat al-Hamam starts at the beginning of the pigeon hunt, The Hanging of Zahran is mostly concerned with describing Zahran’s character and life before his execution. In fact, it never directly references the hunting nor even the British. The only mention of pigeons occurs in a line towards the beginning which describes Zahran as having a pigeon tattoo on his forehead. Instead the village
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becomes “a thousand arm’d dragon / And each arm a dark and sombre alley” and “gentle Zahran” witnesses a child “devoured by fire” one day in the market place. The shooting of Zahran’s wife is never mentioned, although we find out her name, Jamila, and that she and Zahran had many children together. The coupling of vivid, poetic language and metaphor with direct, seemingly biographical details imbues the poem with a combined sense of fantasy and realism, fleshing out Zahran’s humanity while elevating him to the status of a hero. !
Although Makhlouf doesn’t directly reference Salah Abdel Sabour’s poem The
Hanging of Zahran, the title of his piece appears to be a play on words based on another poem: The Pigeons Fly by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. The first stanza of Darwish’s poem is: *)م+& ا$,-. *)م+& ا0 ّ +. yatir al-Hamam yahat al-Hamam The pigeons fly, The pigeons descend. The couplet is repeated throughout the poem, almost like the panels featuring only pigeons (or the pigeons floating blissfully unaware in the background) in Makhlouf’s comic. Makhlouf turns the final part of the phrase into the past tense with “Hat alHamam”, “The pigeons descended” or roosted (or landed). Because the Denshawai Incident is well-known in Egypt, most readers would begin reading with the
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understanding that death plays a key role. Thus Makhlouf’s past tense verb is more about pigeons shot out of the sky and falling to the ground as opposed to gracefully landing and then taking flight again as in Darwish’s poem. This ambiguous tension, introduced right from the outset through the title, challenges the readers ability to extract simple moral lessons from the work. It is then amplified in the first panel when Makhlouf quotes Hafez Ibrahim, the “Poet of the Nile”, who wrote of the Denshawai Incident: “Inma nahnu wa al-hamam suwa’”; “We are equal, the pigeons and us.” !
Sabour’s poem ends, written entirely in fusha, ends with the titular hanging of
Zahran:
Since that day does my village feed only on tears ; Since that day does my village live in desolate despair ; Since that morn does my village fear the treasure of life Yet Zahran had been a true friend of life ; He had died with his eyes full of life ; Why then does my village fear the brightness of life !
"ع23& ا4م إ3676 8& )92". :2 ;<.$= >.3?& ا:@$& اA&وى إ76 )92". :2 ;<.$= )ة,+& اAEF6 )92". :2 ;<.$= )ة,+G& ً )IJ.3K )رنN@)ن ز )ة,P )هR,Sان و$N)ت ز2 .)ة,+&)UEF6 ;<.$= *)ذاGW
Although the translator Omar Sabry altered a couple word choices, his faithfulness to the meaning of the original is apparent. Zahran dies with “his eyes full of life”, a sentiment that is echoed in Egyptian pop star Mohamed Mounir’s song Denshawai. Little information is available regarding this haunting recording. With the low sound quality and minimalist instrumentation, the song is vastly different from Mounir’s more mainstream productions and was likely recorded early in his career in the 1970s.
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Fig. 5: Panel from page 9 out of 17. Translation of Arabic:
“If the government lets them gallop around the country, they must be made aware that this is our land... not their land!”
“And if she [the government] is selling herself... then they must be made aware that we are not for sale... and our blood is costly!”
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According to fan websites, the song has never been included on an album, and was written by the poet Abdel Rahim Mansur1. The song begins with Mounir’s plaintive cries, distant oud plucking and drumming that becomes more insistent as the song builds in energy. The following are the lyrics to the short song presented in full and translated by the author:
Between birth pangs and suffering,
8&X)ض واFZ\[ ا
We are born again.
3&"<R\ ;])6 :2
Between birth pangs and suffering,
8&X)ض واFZ\[ ا
The past is born; Wisdom is born; Music is born; All that has come and gone
<"ل,\ ;_)Zا 3&"<<\ `*a+&وا 3&"<<\ "ةRb&وا
Is still being born in your eyes.
ى وراح3S ;G& اd@
Oh Danshawi, Oh sad flute.
3&"<,\ ;a,RS ;W `e&
But we don’t forget,
:.fP ) ])ي. "اىE]) د.
At the gallows, my boy.
)يe] i2 jRa&
At the gallows, my pain.
ى3&` وJREZع ا
All that has come and gone
ى3k@ `JREZع ا
Is still being born in your eyes.
ى وراح3S ;G& اd@ 3&"<,\ ;a,RS ;W `e&
Both Sabour’s poem and Mounir’s song end with an emphasis on the relationship
Source: http://abdelrehimmansour.blogspot.com/p/blog-page_9960.html Mounir’s song can be heard in full here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETnqHAcE348 1
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Fig. 6: from pages 16 and 17. Translation of the Arabic: “Some people believe that goodness prevails in the end.” Note the bilingual nature of Makhlouf’s signature which is “maخlouf”.
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between life and death: dying with ones’ eyes full of life on the one hand, and the cyclical nature of birth and rebirth in spite of death in the other. Sabour’s poem refers to Zahran’s noble defiance in the face of a corrupt death sentence, while in Mounir’s song the eyes belong to an unidentified woman. Here the English suffers from translation loss because “your eyes” can refer to any gender while the colloquial Arabic makes clear it is the eyes of a woman looking on, perhaps Jamila or one of the victim’s mothers. Another translation of Mounir’s lyric that could partially overcome this loss would be “Is still being born in her eyes.”
Conclusion !
In each of these retellings, the humanity of the Denshawai residents is evoked
and expanded upon despite the imperial oppression. Whether the British and Ottomans are directly alluded to or left out entirely makes no difference because all Egyptians know the story. “To this day, whenever [Denshawai] is mentioned, it serves to arouse indignation among the Egyptians” (al-Sayyid 175). What is different about Makhlouf’s comic strip, then, is the lack of any reference to the public hangings and beatings that resulted from British led show trials. Zahran is shown being taken away after hitting Captain Paul and giving a proto-Nasser speech on Egyptian nationalism , or at least anti-colonialism (Fig. 5). In the background a dovecote, burj al-hamam (literally “pigeon tower”) stands like a statue of Saad Zaghloul with a triumphant dove flying above.
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Although Zahran’s fate is not made explicit in the comic strip, Egyptian readers
would be well aware of his sentence to be hanged. Makhlouf’s comic ends with a farmer identified as Ahmed Said finding the British officer Captain Paul, who ran from the fight, collapsed in a field. The villager tries to assist Paul before another officer arrives and, in an interrogative tone that is ironic given the fact that Said lives in and is from Denshawai, asks him “Inta bita’mil eh ‘andak?” - “What are you doing here?” The officer accuses him of murder and theft to which Said asks rhetorically: “Why? Do I occupy your land, steal your money, disgrace your appearance and spill your blood?!” A bullet is fired and Makhlouf brilliantly draws a panel of a shocked flying pigeon, seducing the reader into believing the pigeon was the victim of the officer’s bullet before revealing the gruesome panel of Said’s head wound (fig. 6).
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But why would poets, musicians, and comic book artists from vastly different
eras in Egypt’s history all return to the Denshawai parable? A major reason for the story’s durability is its relative simplicity and small-scale, allowing for it to be recast as needed in different eras. In the 1950s it dovetailed nicely with Nasser’s Pan-Arabism and the revolts against colonial rule occurring around the world. The honorable peasant can rise up against an imperial power. In the 1970s, one could look to the story for a different kind of meaning in a post-Nasser Egypt and the amputation of the Sinai Peninsula in the Six-Day War with Israel. In that case the message appears to be that Egypt is still under someone else’s rule.
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What makes Makhlouf’s story so compelling is that, in my reading, the harsh
response of the British officers represents Mohamed Morsi’s November 2012 decree that his decisions are above the Mubarak-influenced courts (Kirkpatrick and El Sheikh). Like the British authorities in the early 1900s, who “[sacrificed] justice in the short term in favour of overall stability,” the actions of Morsi’s government had much the same rhetoric (Luke 280). Morsi declaring power over the nation’s courts is a powerful reminder of the British allocating their harsh punishments of Denshawai residents through a supposedly independent court system. Already when Morsi declared his new powers, which he reversed soon after, political opponents called it a “coup” (Kirkpatrick, et al). Seven months later, Morsi’s term would abruptly end due to the combination of renewed Tahrir Square protests and a military coup only four days later. Indeed, with the military coup, the United States’ refusal to call it a coup, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s “sweeping” electoral victory and the harsh death penalties and lifetime sentences given to Muslim Brotherhood members in more kangaroo court cases, it is only a matter of time before another artist draws from the Denshawai Incident. The question is only what medium, and what message.
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Works Cited Abdel Sabour, Salah. Afro-Asian Poetry; An Anthology. Ed. Youssef El
Sebai. Trans. Omar
Sabry. Cairo: Permanent Bureau of Afro-Asian Writers, 1971. Print. Abi-Hamad, S. "The Colonial State and Its Multiple Relations: A Case Study of Egypt." Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 32.1 (2012): 1-12. Web. Guyer, Jonathan M., and Benedict Evans. "Being a Political Cartoonist in Egypt Has Always Been Hard. It's Even Harder After the Charlie Hebdo Attacks." Daily Intelligencer. New York Magazine, 01 Feb. 2015. Web. 23 May 2015. Kirkpatrick, David, and Mayy El Sheikh. "Citing Deadlock, Egypt’s Leader Seizes New Power and Plans Mubarak Retrial." The New York Times. The New York Times, 22 Nov. 2012. Web. 2 June 2015. Luke, Kimberly. "Order or Justice: The Denshawai Incident and British Imperialism." History Compass 5.2 (2007): 278-87. Web. Makhlouf. “Hat al-Hamam.” Tok Tok Nov. 2012: 48-65. Print. Mitchell, Timothy. Colonising Egypt. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988. Print. Mounir, Mohamed. “Denshawai.” Unknown date. Sayyid-Marsot, Afaf Lutfi. Egypt and Cromer; a Study in Anglo-Egyptian Relations. New York: Praeger, 1969. Print. Shunnaq, Abdullah. "Arabic‐English Translation of Political Speeches." Perspectives 8.3 (2000): 207-28. Web. 29 June 2015.