Ottoman History Podcast - Nasser, Nubia, and the Stories of a People

Episode Date: February 5, 2024

with Alia Mossallam hosted by Chris Gratien | In 1952, a coup d'état led by Gamal Abdel Nasser ushered in a revolutionary period of Egyptian history in which sound played an integral role in shaping collective political consciousness. The culture of the 50s and 60s was dominated by songs by artists like Umm Kulthum and Abdel Halim Hafez that still resonate within national consciousness, but as we explore in this third installment of our four-part series on "The Sound of Revolution in Modern Egypt," the period produced spectacular sound as well as conspicous silence. As our guest Alia Mossallam explains, triumphant musical celebrations of the Egyptian state's signature achievement --- the construction of the Aswan High Dam --- shaped the terms through which Egyptians have come to remember this period. At the same time, songs of workers and Nubian villagers displaced by the dam captured subaltern sentiments beneath the surface of Nasserist cultural hegemony. We conclude our conversation with a reflection on the singular importance of sources like folk songs for writing histories erased by official sources.    « Click for More »

This is the Ottoman History Podcast, and I'm Chris Creighton. In a previous episode, we spoke to cultural historian Alia Mosallam about songs from the World War I period in Egypt, and what they revealed about the country's experience of the war. In this episode, we're delving deeper into the power of songs and their role in historical memory, focusing on the 1950s and 60s, a celebrated golden age of Egyptian cultural production and a pivotal moment in the making of the modern Egyptian state.

I was interested in the experiences of people who took part in the student movements in Egypt in the 1930s and 40s and 50s and 60s. And when I was interviewing people from the 60s, they would sort of stare off into space for a bit and then say, you know that song or you know that lyric? Or you know that poem? And then they would quote a stanza and say that's exactly how it felt. Because I did know, and many people of my generation do know, the songs that come from the 50s and 60s.

It's not just how it was at home, it's also Cairo's thick cultural context. I mean, even if you didn't hear Omoulthum at home, you're likely to know the songs from hearing them in taxi cabs and sort of coming out of kiosks in the streets. But it was So I did have an idea and I was fascinated with how often that happened. It's still hard to say what it is exactly, but songs have this power to move you from one moment to another, but also they become a language. They're a sort of shoot into the past. they're they're a sort of shoot into into the past it's the transportative power of songs to to move to move people from the moment they're in to the moment we're talking about especially if

it was a significantly political moment if we are talking about the 1950s in egypt for example then the songs are part of production of like a state production, or a state narrative of the moment, a state archive, if you will. And they're also part how they sort of moved into people's consciousness, you know, how they sort of escaped the radar of logic and become part of people's personal memories. Egyptians who lived through the 50s and 60s experienced interesting times, and their descendants live in the shadow of this momentous era. From the revolution of 1952 until the death of its leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, in 1970, Egypt saw radical socioeconomic change brought on by land reform and the expansion of the military and public sector. Nasser led a group

called the Free Officers, who seized power from the Egyptian monarchy and established a new republic founded on secular Arab nationalist and socialist principles. The new regime spent the coming years battling with both domestic and foreign rivals. In 1956, Egypt fended off the tripartite aggression of Israel, Great Britain, and France in the successful nationalization of the Suez Canal, a key node in Britain's global empire that was constructed with the sweat and blood of Egyptian workers. Nasser became a global anti-imperial icon, and Egypt became the center of pan-Arab politics.

It supported other Arab nationalist causes, like Algeria's long and successful war of independence from French rule. Egypt even briefly unified with Syria. And then, in 1967, Egypt and its Arab allies faced a devastating defeat in the so-called Six-Day War with Israel. Upwards of 10,000 Egyptian soldiers were killed or went missing, and Israel occupied Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, as well as the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza.

When Nasser died unexpectedly in 1970, Egypt and the Arab world experienced collective shock. His massive funeral procession became an outpouring of the intense feelings of triumph and disappointment that defined his era as president. Over the course of that period, Egyptian radio, television, cinema, and music reshaped Arab popular culture. Umm Kulsoom, who had been a major star since the 1920s, became the cultural counterpart to Nasser's political celebrity. One biographer aptly labeled her the voice of Egypt. Her performances were musical marathons of poetry

about love, longing, and devotion set to classical compositions that drew audiences into a collective public sentiment. After Umm Kulthum came the much younger Abd al-Haleem Hafez, whose aesthetic was similar but more varied. Some of his film and live performances had a lighter feel, and some of the songs he performed were more overtly political. Perhaps the most was similar but more varied. Some of his film and live performances had a lighter feel, and some of the songs he performed were more overtly political. Perhaps the most memorable of these was a televised performance of a song titled Hekayet Shab, the story of a people, which commemorated the construction of the Aswan High Dam. The Aswan High Dam built upon prior

Nile River dams completed during the colonial period, but it was much bigger. It expanded the capacity of irrigation and flood control, and it resulted in the creation of a giant man-made lake in its reservoir. It also produced hydroelectric power. It was an impressive engineering feat in an era of high modernist projects. The song Hekaya Chab, as its lyrics stated, was not just the story of the dam, however. It was also the story of the Egyptian people's long history that culminated in the construction of the dam. It referenced prior moments in Egypt's struggle against colonialism

and encouraged audience members to see themselves, every Egyptian, as participants in a national epic. The song was very important because it set a historical narrative straight. And this was something that was very important to Nosseh's regime. There was a movement to rewrite history as like a history of recurring resistances to colonialism, but also, for instance, a history of water management and a history of the management of the Nile and sort of skip British colonialism and those colonial sciences and talk about it as something that started with the pharaohs

and were developed with the Islamic civilization and then Muhammad Ali and then Abdul Nasser. This idea of creating genealogies for certain knowledges and also for creating historical timelines is present in different mediums. In this song, you know, people start by cheering and ululations and clapping and this sort of very celebratory atmosphere. So we said we'd build, and here we built the high dam.

We said we'd build and here we built the high dam. Then Abdel Halim Hafez comes in and goes, Brothers! Stop! Will you allow me to say a word? Yes! The story is not the story of the dam The story is more than just the dam The story is the story of the people The people are in a hurry, their steps are lit with fire. The people are fighting and victory has been written for them. Do you hear the story?

The story of the war is over. It is the story of war and defeat, between us and the colonization. It is the story of war and defeat, between us and the colonization. And he goes all the way back to the early 20th century to Dunchway. Remember when the people wereanged in their own country and you know were being hung. Then what happened, the nationalization of the Suez Canal because it didn't make sense for our water to be used that way and after the nationalization of the canal there was the idea that it didn't make sense for the Nile to be lost at sea, and then the idea of the dam came.

But the dam is not just about this sort of hydroelectric project. It's a war. It's about defeating colonialism. It's about the nationalization process. We have fulfilled our promise We have been chosen The music was sometimes Upper Egyptian, sometimes it was music that came from the Delta. where there are many different voices. The chorus, there was this, you could hear women. There were the workers, you know, the voices of the workers, the voices of the peasants, the voices of children sometimes, students, engineers, etc.

So did people really hear themselves? وانتظرنا انتظرنا انتظرنا هذه حكاية الشعب شعب للزحف المقدس قام وصار شعب زاحف خطوته تولع شرار شعب حقق له جمال الانتصار وانتظرنا انتظرنا انتظرنا It's hard to say why a musical piece or a song is effective, but this song was really internalized in many ways and came up in people's own narrativization of their involvement in the dam. The Nasserist era was defined by a spirit of collective national triumph,

but it was not one in which a plurality of political voices were welcome. Whether the Muslim Brotherhood or far-left communists, political dissenters were often imprisoned and even killed for opposing the new regime. Among the questions that mattered to modern Egyptians, the Aswan High Dam was a relatively uncontroversial project that would have fit with most political ideologies of the era. But while it was constructed for collective national benefit, some paid the price of construction more than others. After all, it wasn't just Egyptian engineers who worked on the dam, but also tens of thousands of laborers who carried out backbreaking work on a massive infrastructure project that took roughly a decade to complete.

Hundreds of workers died in the construction of the Aswan High Dam. In addition, raising the level of the Nile behind the dam reshaped the landscape, leading to the forced displacement of over 100,000 people in Egypt and Sudan. Most of them belonged to the indigenous Nubian people, who lived in the villages of the region for centuries and maintained their own languages and customs. The Egyptian government tried to use this newly displaced population in the development of agricultural projects in southern Egypt, but many people could not adapt and eventually left for the cities of the delta, like Cairo, or emigrated abroad. Many were never really compensated for

their loss. Reconciling the hardship of workers and displaced people with the new national narrative was complicated. On one hand, such people were encouraged to see their sacrifice as a service to the nation. But on the other hand, for many people, the construction of the high dam represented a catastrophic experience of exile that would be passed on to subsequent generations. Ali al-Mosallam's research has investigated the multiplicity of memories about the dam, exploring through songs how people inserted their own voices into the story of a people. The song came up in different ways. For instance, if I would be talking, I was talking to a Nubian family

who were displaced during the building of the dam. And in older generations, so people who were already in their late 20s, early 30s, when they were being displaced, there is regret and there's guilt about being moved, but being displaced, but regret and there's guilt about being moved but um being displaced but but there isn't there wasn't this anger because there was this belief in this you know in this techno social imaginary in this in this general imaginary of what they would be part of and what how things would be and once someone i i said to someone could it not have been otherwise and he looked into space for a while and then he said yeah but which is a direct quote from the song saying yeah but the

water was lost at sea and you know and the deserts were starving or were were thirsty for it and I I was thinking yeah but that's a quote from a song. That's this Gramscian idea of common sense, you know, how an ideology, it trickles. Your sort of personal aspirations and dreams can be coined in an ideology, and in this case, sung in a song. And in the same way, the workers,

a technician, Hassan Aswanli, once explained to me that in his shift while they were working, they would sing this part of the song where there's a description of how the enemy and during the tripartite aggression, Poseidon, 1956, how they came. So they came with their weapons and their planes and their tanks, and they would change it to, you know, their drills and their tractors. So they were the soldiers and they were fighting with their tools. The song was very much internalized. And no, and it speaks to the point you made earlier about how people can repurpose pieces of a song to make it part of their story. And so much of the media from that period, it is intertwined with this collective kind of public sentimentality that is both individual, but also very collective and national. And I don't know, it's a really interesting period in this transition in terms of how the role that music plays in people's lives. But I wanted to ask you about a tension in that story that you just told. The high dam

is the great achievement of the Egyptian national project in this moment, in terms of technocratic achievements, but also one-upping the predecessors, not just the British colonialism, but going all the way back to the 19th century with Mehmet Ali and his state as well. In this regard, it is actually, there's a continuity there, an old continuity of the way in which the state in Egypt, both the medieval, colonial, and national state, is intervening in Upper Egypt, in fact, Sudan, and then culminating in this moment of mass displacement of Nubian people in Egypt as a result of the construction of this dam. You've encountered people who are, you know, maybe workers from these very regions that were subject to this

colonial process, even people who are displaced, who are remembering themselves into the narrative as participants. Did you also encounter divergent narratives that kind of push back against the triumphalist narrative? Is there a multiplicity of ways in which this is remembered through songs or in oral tradition? The experiences of the dam are so diverse. It differs across time because the 60s were a very different time than the 70s. There was a whole switch. I mean, the sort of the cord was pulled out on a whole project in 1970 when Abdel Nasser died, and then it became something else. And the workers even say, I mean, we were builders of the dam, and then suddenly in a year we became workers. When Nubians were displaced in 1964, initially there was shock. I mean, no one anticipated that they would move, that they would be displaced into

the deserts, that the houses wouldn't be ready yet, that they would look the way they were, that they wouldn't have access to the river or to running water, etc. And then when they started to want to demand their right to return, it was already the 60s and there was the war and there was censorship in the 60s where they weren't even allowed to sing the songs because these songs were sung in weddings. They weren't just sung to lament. People sang them in their everyday lives, birthdays, weddings, etc.

And they weren't allowed to sing songs that had to do with the displacement for some time. And then they found other ways by singing in Arabic, for instance, rather than in Nubian, in Kenzi or Fajiki, etc. But there are songs that were sung before 1964 by singers like Ahmed Sidi, who was a Kenzi singer from Gharbisheel, and his songs were like an almost a Nubian version of Abdel Halim Hafez and Umm Kulsoom's songs. They were songs that sung very optimistically about the dam and the running water and the electricity and everything the Nubians would experience once they moved.

And one of these songs is Dayman Nasri Buyanil. And this song, it sings to the Nile and says you've always triumphed us triumphed us and you know triumph us this time too and it's a very upbeat song. And there are many like this during this moment. And he incorporates Arabic words like al-wahda al-arabiyya, Arab unity, al-adwina sulasi, the tripartite aggression, so all the sort of key terms of this narrative. He sort of weaved them into it.

And then the songs that start to appear in the 70s are the mountain sort of asks him, why are you here? And the mountain or a bird started to berate him, you know, why come back now after you've left, there's nothing left to come back to. And so there's a lot of guilt. There's a lot of guilt and sadness for having left. And then in the 80s and 90s, you have a different generation, a sort of generation that has no idea how this could have happened and wasn't part of this moment. It's much easier to be angry.

I mean, it's clear what one is to be angry about. And some of this anger, like in the song It's also directed towards the older generation that moved. I think there's a lyric in the song that talks about how this displacement is a mark of shame on the foreheads of a particular generation. For Gnubian communities, the narrative or the story of the dam keeps changing. And also during that time, in that moment, technicians and workers worked on the dam for some it was a a huge moment of of mobility of social mobility like he would move from being

a peasant whose father always worked for a feudal landlord under various uh repressive conditions to someone who now had the opportunity to travel to the Soviet Union and be trained to become a technician because he was such a good worker, which is an opportunity that landlord's son didn't get because he was not as good as at his work. And someone else has a story, another worker has a story being very critical of the working conditions on the dam. And when he and a number of his friends wrote a letter to Abdul Nasser on a potato sack and sort of addressed it to Gamal Abdul Nasser Manchait al-Bakri, his two friends disappeared.

And he sort of worked as a labor on the dam to sort of disappear into it. And I remember he said that his grandmother perished during the digging of the Suez Canal, or his great-grandmother. And he was asking, what's the difference between our conditions and theirs? There's a wide range of experiences, even when you think about the technical aspect. I mean, some technicians felt that a lot of the Russian tools and technical equipment that they used were very outdated compared to things that could have

come from the US or Norway or Scandinavia in general. The dam sort of became obsolete also in its centrality in their stories and in Egypt's story of modernization and becoming, so to speak. And in the 80s, there was this migration to the Gulf and this sort of opening up of the market, etc. So they were very different circumstances. The workers' compounds that they still live in, that were built to be lived in just during the building of the dam, turned into slums. There's very little infrastructure, etc.

And for many Nubian families, I mean, people had to move away from the, especially the Fajiki and the sort of the displaced lands. While our conversation started with a very overt piece of musical propaganda, the song Haqqai at Shaab performed by Abdelhalim Hafez, through the varied memories and songs about the Aswan Hai Dam, Ali and I began wading deep into the meaning of doing history and the complex ways in which songs disrupt the conventions of the field.

I've always been very interested in songs that persist not because of the record industry but because they are still relevant to people and they're still important to sing within families, in events that are conjurable still. But also they're more protean, they're more malleable, they don't give a single narrative of the past, they have multiplicities, they're like prisms almost. And in the more positivist, older way of doing history, there's a hierarchy there, right? That these sources are more limited and need to be supplemented by the archival record. Give us the opposite argument that actually these are the sources that really tell us,

that allow us to access something possibly more important than anything we could get from the archival record. I'd love to hear you reflect on the value of these sources. When I started out, I was looking for songs that tell us what happened, that tell us what really happened, or to find out exactly when the song was written, or to be able to say who wrote the song. And I struggled with all this,

because this is how we are trained to understand how knowledge is produced, and how also knowledge is given worth. And so there are arguments by the popular memory group, this movement in the UK in the 70s and 80s, that talks about how archives or any source of history is about the production of memory. And even academic sources, you know, state archives, they're about the production of memory. And even academic sources, you know, state archives, they're about the production of a particular kind of memory. And so memory is equally a production of memory that is a micro memory or sort of a family memory, or a community's collective memory. And I mean, each of these sources are problematic. There are, Michel-Rolfe Trouillot talks about

like these sort of levels of power and silencing that go into the archives. There's the person that does the archiving, how they decide to organize it, how it is made accessible and to who and where. In Nubia, there's no word for the displacement. They just use tahjir. And tahjir is sort of the present continuous of

migration. It's the term that was being used in the propaganda at the time. Even terms, experiences are sometimes even stuck in terms, not lyrics or songs. And it's from looking into these sources that are more than just qualitative. They're really sources about the sort of very personal experience of what it means to make that journey at that time. But an example of my own naivety, even when I believed that these songs could be important sources, was when I was doing this research in Nubia and I was looking for songs about the displacement. And someone would sing a song, for instance, and I would think, oh, this is perfect. This is about the displacement. But then they would be describing the topography in the song. And it sounded like Sudan. But then it couldn't have been the 60s, you know, because Sudan was not another country yet. You know, they were talking about Nubian villages

that spread out into Sudan. And I would say, you know, like you know like cut you know this is not the right time period I want the songs from the 60s and that was very ridiculous to people or they would sing a song that's the kind there was a genre of songs that were letters basically that people would sing to someone to sing to someone to sing to someone who would eventually sing it to the lover who's in Cairo for instance And I would start to record the song and then suddenly they would change the name of the girl Talia as you know, as a sort of to play with me. And again, I would be like, cut, you know, stop. This sort of destroys the credibility of the song or its viability or importance as a source. And then someone once

explained to me, you're not, these are not radio songs that are just frozen in time. And this is exactly what you said, that you didn't want recorded songs. You want songs that people sing. And these songs continue to evolve with experience. And the experience here is displacement. And displacement was not only experienced in 64. It was experienced in 58 and 33 and 1912

and since the building of the Aswan Reservoir. And so the experience is as old as the experience is, not as old as the dam is. It was much bigger than just the dam. And it took me some time to understand that that is also what the songs are about, that they are about experience and not just the dates. And that is also the importance of that history also comes from that. Yeah, I mean, that's one of the things that comes out of working with these kind of sources, these songs, you use the word naivete. And I think that there's a naivete

in the way that historians treat sources very superficially, that a song that is invoked in a particular moment may be about another past context or another context, but that's precisely the point of the songs. They already exist there in the memory to be used and transformed in the moment in which they are needed. I think that's a really beautiful thing about these types of sources. Yeah, and also their collectivity i mean i remember in suez when i because my phd focused on the building of the high dam but also the tripartite aggression the resistance in posaid in 56 and the resistance in suez between 67 and 74 and in suez there was this one song that that they used to sing on the front during the war of attrition while they were

during the resistance and there's a stanza the song is called and the stanza goes you know and it's about how we collect the bones of of the dead of our brothers of of our our comrades on the front and we turn them into weapons. When we have nothing left, we will use our own bones. It's a very powerful song. And this was a song that was sort of collectively made up on the front during the War of Attrition and used during the 101 Days of War, which is a totally forgotten moment after the Thagra, the defeat that happened right after the crossing on the 6th of October in 73. There was like a battle in Suez between the 24th of October and the February 1974. And the song was used then.

And then in 2011, in the protests in the summer, I happened to be in Suez doing, you know, my research and there were these protests and people were chanting, very young people were chanting وعدم اخواتنا نم ونلم ونسن ونسن ونعمل منه مدفع وندفع and I had never heard it before in a contemporary context and I kept asking people, where does this chant come from? and they would say, I don't know, I think it might be something old they were not sure where it came from just like we sing, زوروني كل سنة مرة and we didn't know it was about prison and incarceration

and we sing now about feeling estranged in egypt under a military regime and we don't know that that this happened during world war one so there's there's a haunting that's in these songs i think that they somehow encapsulate a sort of a moment a sentiment but also a necessary action the moment where it was being chanted in suez during a protest people i mean people don't don't remember what that it's a song and what the song was about and what the context was but it's a chance you chant to feel stronger to feel braver to to remind yourself and to remind everyone that even if we have nothing, we will fight with the bones of our martyrs. I mean, that sort of collective, I don't know, sentiment, consciousness.

Yeah, bringing a moment back, I think, is a very powerful aspect of songs. Songs help us access histories and memories excluded from the archival record. Alia Moussalam's work shows that even songs produced by the state can shed light onto the plurality of experiences of everyday people, through how they were internalized and transformed. On the other hand, it suggests that the recording industry is largely the enemy of the type of songs that live as embodied memories within people. The media we use to access songs of the past can be part of the violence that history does to those memories. In our final installment of this series on the sound of revolution in modern Egypt, we'll actually explore a medium that was revolutionary in this regard. If the records released by

the recording industry produced canonical versions of popular songs that monopolized their forms, the rise of cassettes created a new way of recording and sharing sounds that put power back into the hands of everyday people. From mundane messages to powerful political critique, cassette technology redefined which voices would be audible to future historians. Our discussion of cassettes in modern Egypt, the veritable media of the masses, will carry all the way into the 21st century when a new media of the masses, social media, became a space of making new songs as well as repurposing old ones within the context of mass political

organization during the Arab Spring. Stay tuned.