Essay: A Feminist in Her 50s in Love
Essay: A Feminist in Her 50s in Love
Umm Kalthoum, Life Magazine, 1962. (Wikimedia, public domain)
This is part two of a two-part Valentine’s Day Special. Part one is here.
I usually ignore Valentine’s Day and I rarely talk or write about love. But much like with religion, if you don’t claim your right to shape, critique and make demands of love–if you don’t stake a claim, even if you don’t practice–you cede the ground to the absurd, the foolish, and the nonsensical.
So here I am, staking my claim to love, as a feminist–more specifically as a feminist in love and in my 50s. In other words: I am both practicing and preaching.
This would have been yet another Valentine’s Day I was happy to ignore were it not for Ainehi Edoro, founder and editor-in-chief of Brittle Paper, an online literary magazine for readers of African Literature, who asked to interview me for the platform’s Valentine series. I took my initial hesitation as a long-overdue challenge: do I want to cede the ground to the absurd, the foolish, and the nonsensical or will I finally own what love is to me?
When an assistant Professor of Global Black Literatures at the University of Winscosin-Madison’s Department of English and Department of African Cultural Studies, asks you “What does a feminist love look like?” it is time to stake your claim to love.
This is the story of how tender labourers, Umm Kalthoum, and bell hooks shaped how this feminist grew to love, powerfully and tenderly and so therefore freely.
At a minimum, I knew what it didn’t look like: it did not look like the night that I killed Valentine’s Day.
There I was, shell shocked in the passenger seat of my then boyfriend’s car in 1997, unsure if I was more distressed that my boyfriend had forgotten it was Valentine’s Day or that I, an avowed feminist, was upset that he had. From that day on, I never “celebrated” Valentine’s Day again. Celebrate that it felt I’d been abducted and replaced with a pathetic replica?
And so I killed Valentine’s Day. Fuck that shit. The absurd, the foolish, and the nonsensical are welcome to it.
I wanted nothing to do with love when I was younger. I started having nightmares when I was 17 that I’d married the wrong man. My subconscious knew something my conscious took years to understand: I was neither heterosexual nor monogamous.
For all my 20s and most of my 30s, I did not have the power for such introspection. I worried that love would wreck me with a weakness I could not afford. I wanted to be free and I associated love–at least in the ways I saw it around me–with the opposite of freedom.
I wanted to be powerful, and I spent my 20s and 30s liberating myself from all that I felt was chaining me.
Feminist love insists on being both powerful and tender, because the sum total is freedom. Free love is revolutionary.
I wanted to be powerful and to be free, and in love, yes. And if I could not have the first two, well, then, love could wait. I chose me. I had to grow into the knowledge that a love that is free is powerful and tender; tender, not weak.
This is the story of how tender labourers, Umm Kalthoum, and bell hooks shaped how this feminist grew to love, powerfully and tenderly and so therefore freely.
I have moved back to Cairo three times. The third, was in 2013 (the first two times were in 1988 and 1999) after the revolution had finally arrived.
I had returned to say "Fuck you, I am not scared. Egypt is mine too," to a regime that had sent its police to break my arms and sexually assault me 18 months earlier, when I was still living in New York City and had been visiting Cairo to take part in one of the most iconic protests during our revolutionary year of 2011.
I had rented an apartment in a neighbourhood where it was easier than others for a woman to live alone and to have lovers spend the night. It helped that my landlady did not live in the same building and that I had no immediate neighbours on my floor because the apartment next door was being renovated.
The construction workers renovating that next-door apartment always started their day with the Umm Kalthoum song Ansak. It was the most tender alarm to awaken to, infusing as it did my mornings with a paean to love that lingers and haunts.
A declaration and a question at once, Ansak means "Forgetting you" and "How could I forget you?"
Ansak is not the most popular song by Umm Kalthoum but for the construction workers next door, it was their song. In it, she is saying she can’t forget, wants to forget, can’t love again, wants to love the beloved again.
Beginning their day with Ansak, were the labourers who carried bags of cement up four flights of stairs on their heads because the rich fucks who owned the building prohibited them from using the elevator so that they did not scratch it.
Who did those men want to forget and yet love again if they could love again? What rebellion in their heart did Ansak revive? Why that song especially?
Who is deemed worthy of love? Who “deserves” love?
These were men accustomed to being treated like shit by rich people who for years successfully blocked all attempts to extend the Cairo subway from reaching their neighbourhood which, much like Manhattan, is an island of wealth and elitist fuckery; people happy to be served by the poor who spent hours commuting to the rich enclave to cook, clean up and serve them. But letting the subway in? Why would they make life easy for the poor?
Who deserves love? The labourers next door knew they did and staked their claim.
When you watch Umm Kalthoum concerts, you can see she allows women to feel powerful and men to be tender. I will always associate Ansak with the tender labourers next door.
In the heternormative universe of love, wherein men “take” and women “give,” allowing women to be powerful and men to be tender is subversive. But Umm Kalthoum is her own universe and in it she was beyond gender and its limited imagination for love; she was both powerful and tender. There is a reason that she is now a queer icon.
In Umm Kalthoum’s universe, love disrupts and disturbs. I migrated to her universe and pleaded for asylum. I had to disrupt and disturb heteronormativity–I wanted to be both powerful and tender. I had to disrupt and disturb mononormativity–to truly love, I must be free and monogamy, for me, was the antithesis of freedom.
Feminist love insists on being both powerful and tender, because the sum total is freedom. Free love is revolutionary.
You have to have lived and loved and lost and had your heart smashed to pieces to appreciate Umm Kalthoum. Her songs are the lyrical equivalent of running your fingers along the scars of your heart.
In 2016, I was invited to South Africa to speak about Egypt, revolution, and feminism. During my visit, I spent an evening with a farming community in Modimolle, where the audience were farmers who were members of either the ANC or the Communist Party, and who called me Comrade Mona (anarchist-me was in heaven).
One farmer asked me if we still listened to Umm Kalthoum in Egypt. I was ecstatic that my comrade introduced Umm Kalthoum into our evening dedicated to revolution–in my country and theirs–and feminism–why both our countries needed it. I happily and at length answered with an enthusiastic yes: because if we loved as fiercely, purely, and as passionately as Umm Kalthoum sang, we would truly be free.
Here’s what I should have added: you have to be old. Yes–look at that: celebrating aging! It took me becoming middle aged to experience and revel in the tender and powerful and so therefore free love that Umm Kalthoum offered.
In Umm Kalthoum’s universe, love disrupts and disturbs. I migrated to her universe and pleaded for asylum.
It was a world of difference to hear her when I returned in 2013 when I was 45, and lived next door to the tender labourers, compared to when I returned to Cairo the first time in 1988, when I was 21 and lived with one of my uncles and his family. Over dinner every evening, he would put Umm Kalthoum on. I squirmed in discomfort. I did not understand why she had such a hold on people.
I was impatient and my heart had not been tested. I am still impatient but my heart has since been shredded to bits.
The only reason I might wish I was born earlier than I was is to have experienced more of Umm Kalthoum’s music as an adult who understood its depth, so that I could be transformed like the woman in the audience at the end of this video of one of her transcendent live performances.
Umm Kalthoum often sang poetry, literally - either poems written especially for her, for which composers created a score, or poetry that was then set to music.
You have to have lived and loved and lost and had your heart smashed to pieces to appreciate Umm Kalthoum. Her songs are the lyrical equivalent of running your fingers along the scars of your heart.
When I was trying to heal in 2011, high on Vicodin, both my arms in casts, and my heart smashed to pieces, I would listen to electronic dance music to lose myself and to Umm Kulthum to find home.
She sang and I heard “Egypt is yours too. Come home. This is Egypt: tenderness and power that can be yours too. Not just what they did to you.” And so I went home that third time.
And it was at home, as a middle-aged woman who had lived and loved and whose heart was full of scars, where I read bell hooks’ Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life, and understood that being tender and powerful would liberate me.
“The desire for sex, the longing to reconcile these desires with a yearning to know love, were all a part of my struggle to become a writer, to invent a living life that could nurture and sustain a liberated woman. Fully feminist, fully self-actualized, I wanted to care for the soul and to let my heart speak,” hooks wrote (emphasis mine).
I understood when I read those paragraphs that it was time to talk about love; that even if I claimed asylum in Umm Kalthoum’s universe, I could not cede the ground in this one to the absurd, the foolish, and the nonsensical; that because I had claimed asylum in Umm Kalthoum’s universe, I had to stake my claim for love in this one too. And it was time to read Communion: The Female Search for Love, the third part of bell hooks’ trilogy on love that looks specifically at the freeing nature of love for midlife women.
My first Valentine is for my first love, Manchester United Football Club, which before I kissed any boys or girls had my heart at the age of nine. And this Valentine is for labourers next door who in 2013 woke me up every morning with the reminder to claim love, to Umm Kalthoum who gifted me power and tenderness, and to bell hooks who encouraged me to say: I am a feminist in her 50s in love, and I am free.
Fuck Valentine’s Day. Happy Valentine’s Day.
Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. She is editing an anthology on menopause called Bloody Hell! And Other Stories: Adventures in Menopause from Across the Personal and Political Spectrum. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.
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