Manhood Is Not Easy: Egyptian Masculinities through the Life of Musician Sayyid Henkish

By Karin van Nieuwkerk

In this in-depth ethnography, Karin van Nieuwkerk takes the autobiographical narrative of Sayyid Henkish, a musician from a long family tradition of wedding performers in Cairo, as a lens through which to explore changing notions of masculinity in an Egyptian community over the course of a single lifetime.







Central to Henkish’s story is his own conception of manhood, which is closely tied to the notion of ibn al-balad, the ‘authentically Egyptian’ lower-middle class male, with all its associated values of nobility, integrity, and toughness. How to embody these communal ideals while providing for his family in the face of economic hardship and the perceived moral ambiguities associated with his work in the entertainment trade are key themes in his narrative.







Van Nieuwkerk situates his account within a growing body of literature on gender that sees masculinity as a lived experience that is constructed and embodied in specific social and historical contexts. In doing so, she shows that the challenges faced by Henkish are not limited to the world of entertainment and that his story offers profound insights into socioeconomic and political changes taking place in Egypt at large and the ways in which these transformations impact and unsettle received notions of masculinity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
• Release date: Jul 23, 2019
• ISBN: 9781617979507

Karin van Nieuwkerk

Karin van Nieuwkerk is an anthropologist and professor of contemporary Islam in Europe and the Middle East at Radboud University, the Netherlands. She is the author of ‘A Trade Like Any Other’: Female Singers and Dancers in Egypt (1995) and Performing Piety: Singers and Actors in Egypt’s Islamic Revival (2013). She is also co-editor of five volumes on Islam, performing arts, and popular culture, including Enjoying Religion: Pleasure and Fun in Established and New Religious Movements (2018).

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

While preparing my fieldwork trip to Egypt to explore a new research topic, I received an email from an American dancer who had recently visited Sayyid Henkish. Sayyid had helped me greatly in the late 1980s during my PhD research on female singers and dancers, being a popular (sha‘bi) musician himself. 1 I had kept contact with him over the years and visited him and his family whenever I was in Egypt. The email conveyed a sense of nostalgia on Sayyid’s part and his feeling that when he died, a wealth of information and experiences within the trade 2 would be lost. I was a bit amazed and even slightly annoyed by this suggestion, as I thought I had collected lots of information about Sayyid and his work, and particularly about his female colleagues, for my book A Trade Like Any Other: Female Singers and Dancers in Egypt. What did he mean? Was there much more out there? Hadn’t he shared it with me?

Suddenly it occurred to me that indeed there was a story he had not told until now: his own story! He introduced me to many of his colleagues and relatives, whose stories I had collected and which Sayyid always illuminated or added to with a wealth of information and his own views. Yet I never systematically sat down with him to take his own life story. He had a different role in my research: that of advisor and teacher not that of a respondent. In fact, he was my key informant, but as an expert I valued for his knowledge rather than for his personal life experiences. Although we shared a lot of experiences and adventures—that is, he took me to many, sometimes quite rough, sha‘bi weddings and provided me with inside information on what I witnessed—these events became fieldwork notes or participant observation.

During and after my research, Sayyid became my big brother in Egypt and a dear friend. Although there were periods of silence when I was not able to do fieldwork in Egypt, we kept irregularly in touch by phone. Pondering this feeling of knowing a lot about him and his background on the one hand, while on the other never having conducted a biographical interview, the thought occurred to me to take a very detailed and extensive life story over several sessions. Of course, I was not sure whether Sayyid would be willing to share his life in full detail, or whether he would be a good storyteller, but I decided to give it a try.

So, when I went to Egypt at the beginning of 2015, I paid Sayyid and his wife a visit. I was invited for lunch and presented my customary gifts from Holland. After exchanging news, I introduced my preliminary thoughts and said that I realized I had interviewed so many people about the trade but I had never taken his story. He did not react to my remark, but his wife took up the issue right away, animatedly repeating and explaining to Sayyid what I—indeed—intended. We decided that Sayyid would give it some thought and that we would discuss it another time.

A few days later I paid him a visit at his music shop in Muhammad ‘Ali Street. We settled in front of his office on two purple plastic chairs with a small table in front of us, accompanied by the shisha, the water pipe, which was his inseparable companion (see figure 2), and resumed our discussion on the project. He said that he was willing to cooperate and that he actually liked the idea. I asked him, using the methods developed by McAdams (1993) what the chapters of his life story would be, thinking that I would use his categorization to structure the different sessions.

Sayyid came up with a chronological structure that appeared quite conventional and gave some highlights of the story that would later unfold: First, tufula, his childhood, during which he witnessed his father, a talented sha‘bi musician, working at weddings. The second period he called bulugh, puberty, during which he started attending and working at sha‘bi weddings with his father. The third was murahqa, adolescence, when he had two secret love affairs that were interrupted by his obligatory entrance into the army. Next was sahib mas’uliya, taking on responsibility, during which he became a professional musician. The following phase, razana, meaning self-composure, steadiness, or gravity of demeanor, was the stage in which he said he became a real man. Manhood brought him the full responsibility for his house, and later his son. In this stage he took up many different activities within the trade to make ends meet. He finished with the stage in which he found himself now, kibir fi-l-sin, or old age, in which he more or less retired, occasionally produced music for a foreign dancer, and kept an eye on the music shop. Sayyid was sixty-five when we embarked on this project.

So far for our first—unrecorded—session. In the ensuing fourteen recorded sessions, Sayyid did not necessarily take his own arrangement as a way to structure his biography, but I found it illuminating for his outlook on life. It occurred to me immediately that it was a man’s perspective, focusing on responsibility, duties, and manliness. I noted down that evening that I should also explore the theme of masculinity with him, not knowing how naturally this theme of manhood would be interwoven in Sayyid’s own story lines.

Around the eighth session, when the taxi took an alternative route, my eye caught graffiti on a yellow painted wall (see figure 1). On the left it reads al-rugula mish bi suhula, manhood is not easy.3 I immediately felt attracted to this expression as very apt for the project I was working on with Sayyid. I returned on foot to take a picture and later showed it to Sayyid. He smiled and nodded in agreement, affirming that being a man is indeed not easy. We then began to discuss his ideas on manhood in a more explicit way. He embraced my suggestion during the final session to use the graffiti as the title for the book.

Figure 1. Graffiti Manhood is not easy. Photograph by Karin van Nieuwkerk.

Sayyid’s developing notions on manliness are a leitmotif in his narrations: in the sessions on childhood, he described his father as his ideal of manhood; during his first love affairs and in his final choice of marriage partner, he explained his ideas on gender and marriage; and last but not least, in all his stories about his work at weddings or later in clubs, we can see how notions of masculinity inform his attitudes toward customers and colleagues as well as toward earning and spending money.

Although Sayyid’s story is a personal and specific narration, it also reflects a certain way of living that is connected with the so-called authentic Egyptians, awlad al-balad.4 The notion of awlad al-balad—as I will explain in chapter 3—is an intricate term that denotes both a certain group of people of lower-middle class background inhabiting sha‘bi quarters of Cairo and complex rules of conduct that embody ‘traditional’ Egyptian values. The people of the country—which would be the literal translation of awlad al-balad—represent the ideal of the highly moral, traditional-minded ordinary Egyptian, also captured in the notion of salt of the earth (Armbrust 1996, 25, 205).

The artists’ community is close to the trades that are usually associated with the authentic Egyptians, particularly those employed in independent free trades, like merchants, coffee shop owners, and skilled artisans living in sha‘bi neighborhoods. Sha‘bi entertainers share the important life events of people in the lower and lower-middle classes by performing for them at occasions like engagements, weddings, and births. Although artists in the wedding season might have periods of affluence, they also have dire periods in which they find it difficult to make ends meet. They also share important values of the awlad al-balad such as hospitality, nobility, responsibility, and conviviality.

The image of the authentic Egyptian is often romanticized in fiction and film and performed on stage in folk dances. It therefore also becomes like a character that can be impersonated. In Sayyid’s story, we will see how he enacted his own ideas of how to be a real authentic Egyptian. The notion of ibn al-balad is closely intertwined with a perspective on manhood, or as Sayyid would explain, "manhood is the same as being an ibn al-balad." The concept of gid‘ana, a set of values including nobility, integrity, and toughness, is particularly important to understanding Sayyid’s outlook on manliness. His conception of manhood is embedded in communal ideals of masculinity. In his story, he relates how he has tried to personify these communal ideals of a real ibn al-balad, with its successes and failures. Reality—as experienced both through economic and political hardship and through the ambiguities related to work at sha‘bi weddings—makes a full embodiment of these ideals difficult at times.

Sayyid’s story will thus also illuminate the life and struggles of the lower-middle class of awlad al-balad and its associated values. Yet, although closely connected to and exemplifying the values of awlad al-balad, Sayyid’s narration also gives insight into the life and work of sha‘bi entertainers, who have their own habits, morals, and even secret jargon. His story will thus also shine a light on the unique life of a sha‘bi musician. Although I have studied this before, particularly the position of female entertainers, it was intriguing to hear his lifelong experiences and views on the trade as a man. Some aspects of the trade, like working behind a dancer, might appear to endanger a full embodiment of the script of manhood5 according to awlad al-balad ideals.

Of course, many developments in Egypt affected the entertainment trade. Sayyid’s personal and family history therefore not only provide insight into the developments of the trade, but help us to understand changes in Egypt at large as well. The state of the economy in particular had a huge impact on working in the trade and made Sayyid look for different options or combine various jobs at the same time. Manhood is strongly related to earning and spending money, so it is hit hard by an economic crisis.

Sayyid’s story accordingly has many layers: starting from his personal life story in which becoming a man was the leitmotif, it is embedded in a set of communal values related to the concept and lifestyle of being authentically Egyptian, and particularly being an Egyptian man. In addition, his story is heavily colored by being a sha‘bi musician, a trade that changed rapidly from the 1980s onward. Finally, how to embody ideals of manhood within a trade in recession also reflects larger changes in Egypt as a whole.

Sayyid enjoyed embarking on this project for several reasons. He wanted me to stress in this introduction that money was one of the least important: Tell that I did not work with you on this project because of the money, but because of the great friendship between the two of us—the long friendship of twenty-five years! When it became clear to me that his story would not be told in a few sessions, I offered to pay him for the sessions because it took a lot of his time. Although friendship and interest in the topic were more important, paying him for his services and knowledge had been the way we had always worked together since the late 1990s.

The intersection—rather than contradiction—between friendship and material benefit was also visible in the obligatory and reciprocal acts of hospitality or wagib. This is customary among Egyptians, but I was also expected to reciprocate his efforts and the invitations to his home by doing wagib, like taking Sayyid and his wife out for dinner, or buying them food. Whenever I did, Sayyid told me, "You are a bint gad‘a," connoting positive moral values such as being noble, hospitable, and tough, core values of the imagined community of awlad al-balad and, particularly, of manhood.

It was interesting to see how Sayyid extended the concept of gid‘ana not only to me as a woman, but also to me as a foreigner. It will become clear in his story about Egyptian nightclub dancers, as well as on his long friendship with an American dancer, Ni‘ma, how women can exhibit certain aspects of manliness as well. This draws attention to Sayyid’s construct of manhood as a stance (mawqif) and a way of acting that has to be embodied in daily life. In this performative understanding of masculinity women can also partake.

Sayyid’s biography thus provides insight into different cultural values and lifestyles and offers a way to read culture, in this case from a man’s perspective (Plummer 2012b, 10). Before embarking on Sayyid’s life story, I will first explain the importance of a biographical approach for reading culture and understanding world views, then analyze studies on masculinity and give an overview of the notion of being an authentically Egyptian man.

Part 1

THEORETICAL REFLECTIONS

If you want to know me, then you must know my story, for my story defines who I am. And if I want to know myself, to gain insight into the meaning of my own life, then I too must come to know my own story .  . . a story I continue to revise, and tell myself (and sometimes to others) as I go on living. We are all tellers of tales. We seek to provide our scattered and often confusing experiences with a sense of coherence by arranging the episodes of our lives into stories (McAdams ١٩٩٣, ١١ ).

Collecting life stories is one of the oldest research methods in the social sciences. Yet, the last three decades have seen an expansion of biographical methods, a development also captured in the phrase the biographical turn (Goodwin 2012). Other scholars characterize the twenty-first century as an auto/biographical society, in which life stories are present everywhere, including in the new media (Plummer 2012a, 38). In anthropology and ethnography, life stories have a long history in acting as a method of grasping the life worlds of others, although recently the focus has shifted to self-inscription of the ethnographer in the anthropological texts (Reed-Danahay 2012). Life stories offer an important avenue to reflect on others and self, and their relationships to culture and history.

Life stories enable a rich documentation of personal experience, ideology, and subjectivity. Yet they also make possible the documentation of social structures and institutions of power (Connell 1995, 89). The biographical perspective allows the researcher to grasp the effects of historical events on the course of life and straddles a middle road between accounting for social, cultural, and historical structures on the one hand and, on the other, for the way individual actors make sense of and deal with ensuing opportunities and constraints in daily life (Miller 2012). Or, in the words of Plummer (2012b, 1), life stories bridge cultural history with personal biography; they are also moral constructions, tales of virtue and non-virtue, which may act to guide us in our ethical lives. Paraphrasing the title of McAdams’ book, Plummer continues that the life stories we construct of our lives may well become the ‘stories we live by’ (2012b, 1). What really matters to people is fashioned into a narrative that keeps on being told in their life stories. For that reason, life stories are a crucial tool for ethnographic research.

The possibility of ‘reading cultures’ (Plummer 2012b, 10) by telling and listening to, writing and reading, a life story is precisely what this book aims to achieve. Sayyid’s story is both a way for Sayyid to make sense of his life, its opportunities and constraints within a certain time and place, and a glimpse for us into the socio-cultural and moral world from which the telling emerges. His story is embedded in historical developments and communal values while at the same time showing his unique way of dealing with and being part of the changing socio-political context in which he tries to embody and live his ethical tale.

Life Story ApproacheThe narratives are thus multilayereds and Genres

Life history is a well-established genre within the historical disciplines. The tradition of biographies of great men, has long been replaced by interest in oral history dedicated to ordinary lives, stories from the margins and from those who are neglected, silenced, and subordinated or deviant. Particularly the intersection of macro and micro history—instead of perceiving it as an opposition—and researching social change by a biographical focus have been productive fields for historians (Ginzburg 1991; Mintz 1982; McLeod and Thomson 2012; Plummer 2012a). The dual focus on history—that is, how time is lived in the life story as well as how historical times play out in shaping the life (Plummer 2001, 39)—makes the life story an important tool for historians.

The biographical approach has also been widely used in sociology, particularly within the study of deviance (Miller 2012). Sociologists like Denzin and Plummer are prolific writers probing into a broad use and application of (interpretive) biography (Denzin 1989, 2012, 2014; Plummer 2001, 2012a, 2012b). In the interpretive biographical method, the emphasis is put on self, biography, history and experience in which process and structure must be blended with lived experience (Denzin 2012, 6). The researcher is encouraged to collect in-depth personal histories since a person can tell multiple stories about his or her life. Not only do individual lives contain multiple narratives, no personal story will contain all the stories that could be narrated. For that reason, it is advised to combine the personal story with self-stories of other individuals located in the field of research.

In my previous research, in which Sayyid was crucial but not focal, I combined the historians’ concern for intersecting scales of micro and macro developments as played out in the artists’ community—a group that shares elements of secrecy and marginality with other deviant groups—with the sociologists’ concern for triangulation. I collected oral histories of Sayyid’s colleagues to trace the developments of the entertainment trade. I will take this background along in writing this book without going back to their stories in detail. They will be approached through Sayyid’s narratives on his colleagues and the changes they have witnessed together in the trade. The previous stories were what Plummer (2001, 20–24) calls short life stories, whereas the present narrative is a long life story told over many recorded sessions and many years of sharing experiences. Having previously taken short life stories of Sayyid’s colleagues—mostly women—I have a profound background of the intricacies of the trade, and I will also be able to point out the gendered difference in how stories about it are told.

Sociologists, such as Denzin and Plummer, as well as many anthropologists (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Rabinow 1977; Reed-Danahay 2012; Herzfeld 1997; Caplan 1997) have refocused the interest in biographical methods to the representational powers in writing the other’s story. The trend toward reflexivity in anthropology is influenced most of all by postmodern and feminist critiques on the power relations inherent in ethnographic accounts. Reflexivity led to heightened awareness of how knowledge is actually construed within the dialectic encounter between the self and the other. This, however, sits in a tense relationship with the realization that not only does the researcher represent the other, but this representation is also intimately influenced by the anthropologist’s own positioning. Combined with a postmodern skepticism toward general knowledge claims and grand narratives, the focus was turned inward to the role of anthropologists within their own writing on others (Anderson 2012; Miller 2012; Schielke and Debevec 2012).

With the spread of postmodern thought, distinctions between author and subject, autobiography and biography, fiction and fact become more and more blurred (Plummer 2012a). This led to the genre of the auto-ethnography, in which the ethnographer is inside the text in an autobiographical way (Denzin 1989; Reed-Danahay 1997, 2012). Or, in Denzin’s words: "all ethnographers reflexively (or unreflexively) write themselves into their ethnographies. The ethnographer’s writing self cannot not be present . . . (٢٠١٤, ٢٦). Although the reflexive turn is immensely important within anthropology, the auto-genre has also been criticized as self-absorbed or, following Geertz, author saturated" (Anderson ٢٠٠٦, ٣٦٧). The anthropologist’s exposure of self should be relevant and not for its own sake, lest the reflexivity lead to losing sight of the interlocutors in the study. It might—unintentionally—shift the balance of power to the anthropologist as author, whereas its original aim was to restore the balance toward the teller.

Nevertheless, the reflexive turn has had a lasting impact. The need to reflect on the research context, dialogic interaction, positioning of researchers and interlocutors, research ethics, and power relations has become essential to all anthropologists. Whether this requirement foregrounds the researcher or not depends on the aim and topic of the study. Although the present book is not meant as an auto-ethnography, I—as an ethnographer or anthropologist—will be present in several ways. Not only did I initiate the project and translate and edit Sayyid’s story, I am also a (small) part of that story due to our long friendship and collaboration, on which Sayyid occasionally reflects in his narration. I will also add several sections providing background information on the trade and the popular artists’ community to provide insight to the socio-cultural context of Sayyid’s narration. Yet Sayyid’s life story will be central.

I have not chosen a dialogical style simply because it was principally a monologue from Sayyid on his life and experiences. The sessions followed a certain ritual. Usually we sat together in the morning on the purple chairs in front of his shop (see figure 2). I always found him waiting for me there with the newspaper and the shisha at hand. We usually chatted a bit about what I had done since the last time I saw him, his latest news—usually business- and family-related issues—and particularly politics, as it was a period of unrest in Egypt. After ordering tea and preparing his shisha, he gave a sign that the recorder could be switched on. His power of concentration usually flagged after an hour, after which we sat and chatted for a while.

Although I occasionally interrupted him with questions and points for clarification, he made it clear that he was going to tell the story his way and would come to my queries in due course. Before and after the sessions and during the final session I could raise questions about outstanding issues or missing plots in the story. Yet it was mostly one concentrated story line per session, usually ending with a preview for the story he would tell next time. Accordingly, to convey the sense of his style of narrating, an unbroken story line is most fitting.

Quite often, however, his story was interrupted by the events going on in the street in front of us: our shoes were cleaned, a row had to be settled, a neighbor’s death was announced, tomatoes or bananas were bought or a drum was sold, and his many friends and acquaintances had to be greeted and kissed on the cheeks. This vivid street life was a small ethnography in itself. Also, Sayyid’s mood before and during the telling was sometimes influenced by his daily sorrows, family affairs, and lack of clientele for the small music shop, issues he raised before switching on the recorder. I will try to convey some of the flavor and the small talk before and after the recordings in the introductory paragraph to each section.

I have chosen to call it a bio-ethnography for several reasons. The ethnography part of the description is meant to convey the sense that his story is a way of reading cultures about the trade, about manhood, and about a specific way of living in popular neighborhoods like Muhammad ‘Ali Street. The ethnographical aspects of Sayyid’s story line are abundant for various reasons. In a way, this book is a follow-up of my ethnography "A Trade Like