Shadi Abdel Salam’s Language for the Times

Set in 1881, a year before the British invasion of Egypt, the film is based on the true story of an Upper Egyptian clan who controlled a mountain near Thebes. Members of the tribe raided the afterlife cache of Twenty-First Dynasty royal mummies and sold these artifacts on the black market. The film opens as Wanis, a young man from the tribe, becomes its leader following his father’s death and brother’s murder. As the chiefdom’s new leader, the young Wanis is bestowed and burdened with his tribe’s secret regarding the source of their livelihood. He grapples with his loyalty to the tribe and his sense of duty to preserve his country’s heritage. The plot unfolds with Shakespearean intensity and a deliberate, somber pace as Wanis broods over and ultimately decides to expose and end the looting practice. 

Filmed in Luxor, Al-Momia is characterized by its painting-like scenography of stark and static desert landscapes, juxtaposed with striking costumes, dramatic chiseled faces, and a haunting score. Poetic monologues of classical spoken Arabic enhance a sense of monumentality that had not been utilized in other Arab cinema of this historiography. Filmed immediately following Egypt’s defeat in the Six-Day War of 1967, Al-Momia adopted a nationalist tone infused with the undercurrents of quandary and regret. The confluence of its painterly, minimalist cinematography, formal dialect, and modern-day preoccupations imploded ideas of what cinema could be, introducing a novel artistic vision and sensibility to the Arabic screen. It was the first Egyptian film to screen in North American theaters and was Egypt’s entry for the 43rd Academy Awards in the Best Foreign Language Film category. Despite its initial failure commercially, Al-Momia eventually became a classic and was restored by Martin Scorsese’s The Film Foundation in 2009.

Al-Momia was to be Abdel Salam’s only feature-length film, but not his last attempt to push and mutate ideas of style and form. His subsequent film, a 20-minute short, Al-Fallah al-Fasih (The Eloquent Peasant, 1970), was built and borrowed from Al-Momia but with a more bare-bones,  what one might call modernist, approach. Based on a surviving Middle Kingdom literary text, the film tells the folk tale of Khunanup, a poor peasant traveling to the market, his donkeys saddled with goods for trade. Khunanup passes through the land of a wealthy overseer named Nemtynakht, who eyes the peasant and becomes greedy for his goods. He sets a trap to obstruct the peasant’s path, leaving Khunanup no choice but to trespass. Nemtynakht then confiscates the donkeys and goods and falsely accuses Khunanup of theft. Determined to seek justice, Khunanup travels to the royal court to plead his case before the high steward, Rensi. His eloquent and poetic speeches about fairness, justice, and the role of leaders in upholding ma’at (the ancient Egyptian concept of truth, harmony, order, and justice) captivate Rensi, who relays Khunanup’s complaints to the ruling pharaoh, who is equally enraptured. He decides to prolong the proceedings simply to hear more of the peasant’s eloquence. Throughout nine petitions, Khunanup continues to poetically orate his wisdom, advocating for justice and exposing the moral responsibilities of those in power. 

For the first seven minutes of Al-Fallah al-Fasih, nobody speaks. The vantage point is the panning in and out of Khunanup’s desert trek with his donkeys. This journey, quotidian in its detail, plays like a slow-moving painting. It may or may not be a coincidence that Mahmoud Saïd, commonly known as the greatest modernist Egyptian painter, had died several years prior. Abdel Salam’s cinematography evokes his oeuvre of traditional landscapes and figures with an eye for color, light, and contrast—only this time set thousands of years earlier. It is this juxtaposition of Abdel Salam’s preoccupation with ancient stories and themes and his distinctly modern visual sensibility that has allowed his work to transcend time. It is also what most preoccupies me—having watched and studied Abdel Salam’s films repeatedly over the years—as a writer who thinks of novel writing through the prism of film. Abdel Salam introduced a cinematic language comparable to what a group of Egyptian writers, including Edwar al-Kharrat and Sonallah Ibrahim, offered to literature in the same period after the 1967 defeat (aka the Naksa): a “new sensibility,” essentially an austere prose to reflect the times. While the writing was more stripped away, grounded in the sense of loss, Abdel Salam’s cinema carried a greater moral messaging in the contemplation of right and wrong—a product, one presumes, in the case of Al-Momia, of Egyptian cinema’s state backing. It is, to my mind, where his choice of formal Arabic also comes in, as an expression of gravity and arresting distinction of form.

Al-Fallah al-Fasih preoccupies me precisely for its containment of a modernist approach of minimalist dialogue and evocative use of silence to contemplate the deeper philosophical questions of identity, justice, and nation-state; the scenography here and the visual tone are paramount to the spoken word. The very formality of the little language spoken in an otherwise no-frills setting is also striking. Traditional heroism is cast aside, focusing instead on the power of words and intellect as tools for resistance against systemic injustice. Eventually in Al-Fallah al-Fasih, the pharaoh, moved by Khunanup’s arguments, orders the return of his property and punishes Nemtynakht. The peasant’s eloquence—his singular vision and integrity—becomes a metaphor for individual agency in a world dominated by power and corruption. It is a visual and narrative distillation of what Al-Momia embodied. Egyptian writers of the 1960s generation used this same form and style as a political expression. The spare prose, the bleak quotidian storylines, and the often-absent dialogue came to be thought of as a language of defeat. Both Abdel Salam and his literary contemporaries created worlds that were artistically abstracted yet historically accurate and politically potent. 

Abdel Salam’s use of painterly compositions, symbolic framing, and muted colors situates his narrative in a liminal space—neither strictly historical nor entirely contemporary—yet the overarching effect is a work that is entirely forward-looking. In recent months, as I considered the question of how to create a literary work that might best articulate the complexities of this moment, I’ve returned to Al-Fallah al-Fasih. How can one manipulate style and form to convey the brutality of history and the stripping away of agency while still preserving artistic integrity and not letting the political overpower? How does one situate personal sensibility and experience in a historical context and canon to create an abstracted, sui generis visual or literary language, one that will withstand the test of time? Egypt’s 2011 revolution has often been described in the years since then as the second Naksa. Revolutionary hopes were quashed with a return to an authoritarian status quo and the state’s erasure of revolutionary memory from Cairo, which only seems to intensify with each passing day. The historic city is being bulldozed to the ground by the government, and ancient monuments are being destroyed, or displaced. It is not Gaza, but it is against this backdrop that I consider these questions of literary aesthetic as I try to make sense of what has become of my city and my sense of place in it—the lack of agency and the powerlessness to influence change in any way—through my writing. The language and forms used by Abdel Salam and his contemporaries were drawn as much from the past, from all that had been made before, as from their present realities. They invented—not just for the moment but for an alternate path forward—a new vision. Theirs is the type of groundbreaking language that is needed now.