Abstract
Mona Abaza’s The Cotton Plantation Remembered: An Egyptian Family Story is a truly intricate tale of three generations of a family, whose lives and those of their numerous dependents are shaped by the rise and fall of cotton production and trade in Egypt. Profusely illustrated with photographs of the family, workers, the estate in its glorious past and current ruins, furnishings, artifacts, and a seemingly endless series of documents, including the most complex accounting systems, from which the author draws inferences to piece together the functioning of the estate, the book also reflects broader changes in the country’s social and political scene with photographs of visiting politicians including Prime Minister Ismail Sidqi, the legendary singer Umm Kulthum, and the actor-singer Muhammad ‘Abd al-Wahhab, hero of the Arabic film The White Flower, which was shot at the izba itself. At the height of its prosperity, ‘the izba turned into something of a mythical place with numerous inflated stories of banqueting, jet-set singers, actors, influential politicians, bandits, and police officers – and . . . vendettas and killings’ (p. 90).
Not a purely visual ethnography but a mixture of images and text, the book presents Abaza’s interpretation of a rich collection of imagery juxtaposed with interviews, conversations, and long, detailed discussions with retainers whose lives played out in the cotton estate itself, the few remaining members of her family, and most important of all, her own memories. The narrative which began as a tribute to the memory of her beloved mother expands into a social history of rural Egypt from the late 1920s to 2003, the regimes of three presidents: Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak, and a brief glimpse into the broader impacts of the revolution of 25 January 2011.
The underlying thread running through the book is that of contrast and conflict between traditional and cosmopolitan influences both among and within families; the affluence of plantation owners and the misery, even destitution, of the workers; the prosperity of the cotton producing belt in the Delta and the backwardness and poverty of Upper Egypt; and the class-conscious cosmopolitan elite versus the nouveau-riche of fidaheen origin. The author’s conscious decision to capture the ‘spirits of the izba’ in sepia hues as against the multihued images of fields and village life only serves to underline these contrasts. The author’s aim, in her own words, is to go beyond ethnography and, ‘convey, through images and texts, a narrative of violence that bound together two life-worlds that though entirely different, were yet vitally intertwined’ (p. 62).
Loosely organized in six chapters, the narrative begins with the author’s bereavement, her attempt to come to terms with her loss, and childhood memories of vacations spent at the izba. Moving on in a broader perspective to the feudal culture spawned by the introduction of commercial cotton cultivation in Egypt, it then narrows its focus, zooming in on the Fuuda family from its simple peasant beginnings to the heights of prosperity and power in the 1960s. The focus moves again to the cotton estate itself, its functionaries, organizational structure, and style of management. A brief chapter exposes and explains the hidden violence behind the deceptive peace of the idyllic rural setting. The final chapter turns to the village as an entity in itself – its beginnings as a collection of mud-brick dwellings of estate employees, little more than single-storied, windowless huts (the author points out that taller structures were prohibited, because no house could be higher than the owner’s mansion), and the slow transformation into a collection of shoddy, multistoried red brick tenements mirroring the urban slums of cities like Cairo. As the author writes, ‘The old villages have hugely expanded into ugly, crammed, four and five story buildings, red brick urban conglomerates that are daily swallowing the agricultural land’ (p. 64).
Much of the narrative moves from episode to episode, fashioning constructs of life in the da’ira – the complex chain of management, the intricate documentation, the political manipulations, the culture of retaining dubious henchman to maintain discipline, and the violence and intimidation necessary to gain disciplinary or political ends. Each chapter closes with a pen portrait relating the story and fortunes of a key character, whose life shapes the functioning of the da’ira and is in turn shaped by it. A poignant current-day image in the chain of events is invoked by the author and her sister’s symbolic attempt to put an end to their family history of violence by surrendering valuable antique weapons to the local police.
Drawing parallels with Southern cotton plantations in the United States is inevitable, although the author points out that slavery and racial discrimination were never part of the Egyptian scene; yet the Egyptian da’ira was not very different, being manned by ‘a large army of wretched permanent workers’ (p. 74), supplemented by truckloads of marginalized seasonal workers or tarahil, who fared even more poorly and are ‘to this day remembered for their utter destitution and misery’ (p. 75). It is interesting that the author writes that the tarahil system as it existed then, died out with the liberalization of the Egyptian economy, but appears to have re-emerged in the booming construction sector with the rapid urbanization taking place in the country.
Another image that emerges is that of gender discrimination, to which the tragic life of the author’s mother bears eloquent testimony. Notwithstanding a foreign education and a Western lifestyle, family wars over inheritance, especially gender disparity between siblings, persist. In the author’s words, ‘[t]hese family wars continue to be the most striking of modern tragedies in gender relations among this class of declining landowners’ (p. 132). But the discrimination is not limited to inheritance. Born to affluent parents with a mother of Turkish Circassian ruling class origin, yet denied luxury, strictly chaperoned, refused a college education despite academic brilliance and pushed into marriage as a child, Laila Fuuda, the protagonist of the story, and the author’s mother, found release from her traumatic existence only when she secured her first poor paying job and the freedom to live life on her own terms. Her transformation from a socialite to a full-time farmer living in the family da’ira, is a story that underscores the deep entrenchment of gender bias even in elite and powerful families.
Looking back on this vibrant history, and focusing now on the broader rural context, the author closes with a review of the transformation of the village (once part of the da’ira) and the villagers. Changes are evident not only in outward appearance, but also in terms of assets, aspirations, lifestyles, and emerging community solidarity. To the author, what is key to this change is the breaking of the ‘circle of fear,’ which she attributes to the January 2011 revolution. Freedom from fear is sowing the seeds of transformation, and there is now hope that these, someday, may blossom and free the countryside from the economic and social discrimination that it has always faced.