PARIS — The diva sings of love and unmitigated lust.
Dressed in a scarlet evening gown with her hair pulled high, she cries out to
her beloved, and longs for a night with him and yearns for the sun not to rise.
اضافة اعلان
The vocalist in the 1969 concert video is
Umm Kulthum: the
Arab world’s greatest 20th-century performer, possibly the best-known Egyptian
woman since Cleopatra and star of the exhibition “Divas” at the Institut du
Monde Arabe, or Arab World Institute, in Paris.
The show, which runs through September 26, is a richly
illustrated flashback to the period between the 1920s and the 1970s. It
portrays women performing on stage and screen without fear of censorship or
religious condemnation, and feminists, political activists, and pioneering
impresarios facing down the patriarchy.
“The exhibition knocks down a fair number of cliches and
preconceived ideas about this part of the world. Women actually occupied center
stage, embodied modernity and were not at all absent from history,” said Élodie
Bouffard, the exhibition’s co-curator. “They sang, acted, made people cry,
broke hearts, and showed off their bodies just as Western actresses did at the
time.”
The institute’s president, Jack Lang, who was France’s
culture minister in the 1980s and early 1990s, recalled in an interview that
when he was a boy visiting Cairo, he sneaked into a theater where Kulthum was
performing, and was “stunned, absolutely breathtaken.” He later heard another
singer, Fayrouz (the exhibition’s other major diva), while touring in Lebanon
as a young actor, he said, then gave her a medal as culture minister in 1988.
These women were not just exceptional vocalists, Lang noted:
Some participated in their country’s struggle for independence from the
colonial powers, Britain and France, and joined in a wave of nationalism that
swept across the Arab world. “The emergence of these divas coincided more or
less with a time of collective emancipation,” Lang explained. “The music sung
by them is an extraordinary expression of freedom.”
The exhibition opens in pre-World War II Cairo, the artistic
and intellectual hub of the Arab world, where concert halls proliferated, many
of them established by women, exhibition co-curator Hanna Boghanim said. Women
also had a significant role in the film industry, she added, working as
“directors, producers, actresses, costume makers, talent scouts.”
Many of these women came from very humble backgrounds,
including Kulthum, who is introduced in a velvet-curtained enclosure in the
show. Born in a village in the Nile Delta, she first performed disguised as a
boy, singing religious songs that bewitched the crowds. Eventually, she came
into her own, as a woman and as a voice, and became famous for her
improvisational style. Her songs sometimes went on for more than an hour.
Her story is told through photographs, album and magazine
covers, videos, and bright-colored costumes created for the 2017 biopic
“Looking for Umm Kulthum,” directed by Iranian-born artist and filmmaker Shirin
Neshat.
There are no loans from the Kulthum museum in Cairo, the
curators said; they were too complicated and expensive to organize. Nor are
there loans from Fayrouz, who is still alive, despite requests made via the
family and entourage of the reclusive vocalist. Her section contains posters,
album and magazine covers, photographs, and other paraphernalia, some compiled
by a dedicated fan.
By contrast, the section on half-Algerian, half-Lebanese
diva Warda is full of her personal possessions: sunglasses, medals, earrings,
passports, an oud, a brown leather suitcase and an Agatha Christie crime novel.
Born in the Paris suburbs, Warda made her debut as a child in her father’s
cabaret in the city’s Latin Quarter and became a successful recording artist
before moving to Algeria in 1962, the year the country gained independence from
France. There, she married an army officer who stopped her from singing. Her
career took off when she moved to Egypt a decade later.
The exhibition gets racier as it goes along, culminating
with the last wave of 20th-century Arab divas, including Egyptian-born Dalida,
who became a superstar in France.
In the decades since, the place of female performers in Arab
countries has changed. Islamist movements and migration from rural areas have
made parts of society more conservative about women’s dress and public
behavior. That has led to assumptions in the West that Arab women are veiled
and constrained today, as opposed to the decades when the divas reigned.
To Coline Houssais, author of “Music of the Arab World: An
Anthology of 100 Artists,” these then-versus-now perceptions, which the
exhibition risked encouraging, were misguided.
“There are two visions of the Arab world,” she said in an
interview. “One is: ‘They’re barbarians, they’re Islamists.’ The other is:
‘Everything used to be so good before. It was a golden age.’”
“The Arab world’s development is measured using
ultra-Western criteria, such as whether women smoke or not, or whether they
wear short skirts,” she said. There were “more important factors, to do with
equality: the number of women who work, women’s civil rights,” she added.
Despite the
coronavirus epidemic, the show is a hit with
Parisian museumgoers, and visitors to the exhibition appeared to validate
Houssais’ assessment. On a recent afternoon, onlookers seemed intrigued by the
story of these stars of yesterday, who bucked contemporary stereotypes about
Muslim women in France.
“It’s really very interesting to find out about the
emancipation of women in these societies and to see the contrast with today,
even in terms of hairstyles,” said Camille Hurel, 23, a visitor to the show.
“These were strong personalities who were known all around the world.”
Houssais said that, in fact, the Arab world today is mostly
populated with people under 30, a generation “glued to social media, completely
open to the world and leading their own private revolutions against their
families and their communities.”
Read more
trending stories
.jpg)
.jpg)
