At the climax of Egyptian author Out el Kouloub's novel, Zanouba, the reader is witness to a crime. We find ourselves in Matariyya, a village north of Cairo, in a somber bedchamber with a blind shaykh. It is the room where only a week before Zanouba, the novel's titular character, suffered a forced miscarriage in the final month of her pregnancy and lost her long-coveted male child. The women of the household are lined up in front of the shaykh—all except for Zanouba, who is still bedridden, and her co-wife, Mashallah, who is exempt from participating because she is menstruating. They prepare to swear on the Qurʾan their innocence in the matter of the miscarriage, as Zanouba's husband, Abdel Meguid, and her mother-in-law suspect foul play.Footnote 1
The women pass the holy book around, taking the oath one by one, until it reaches the hands of Behita, a Sudanese servant woman. Behita is terrified. Yet she restrains herself from looking over at Mashallah—the reason she is in this predicament in the first place. Upon finding out Zanouba was pregnant and potentially carrying a male heir, the barren wife “borrowed” Behita from her aunt to capitalize on her knowledge of herbs and her familiarity with the spice merchants in the Mousky district of Cairo to secretly terminate Zanouba's pregnancy. The dastardly plot was all Mashallah's; as an enslaved member of the household, Behita could not refuse Mashallah's request. But Behita faces the harshest consequences. Only moments after uttering the oath, Behita collapses to the ground, writhing as if attacked by some invisible force. She then goes still. Her right side is paralyzed. She is unable to speak. Her left eye flashes around the room in silent horror.Footnote 2
Out el Kouloub intends for this scene to be a moment of justice in the harem. But justice for whom? The women of the household turn their backs on Mashallah, now sure she is to blame for the miscarriage. The servants refuse to answer her summons. Mashallah escapes to the home of her wealthy parents and demands a divorce from Abdel Meguid. Zanouba is vindicated. Yet, what is to become of Behita—a coerced participant in this tragedy? Mashallah leaves her broken on the floor of her bedchamber with a false promise to send for her soon, her only concern being, “What if she should regain her speech?”Footnote 3 The reader learns no more of Behita or her fate, for her role in the narrative is complete. Behita—presented in the novel as a cunning Black woman—is merely a device for Out el Kouloub's plot, just as she was for Mashallah's evil plans.
Originally published in French in 1947, Zanouba was praised for painting a vibrant portrait of the domestic lives of women in turn-of-the-20th-century Egypt. Although a work of fiction, Out el Kouloub's rich prose and almost ethnographic detail transform Zanouba into an uncanny mirror of the realities of Egyptian women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries—at least as she experienced them. It deals with issues of marriage, portrays rivalry and camaraderie between co-wives, and offers vivid descriptions of women-centered knowledge of fertility and fears of infertility. Much can be said about Out el Kouloub's unusual position as a francophone author and Egyptian woman. Her meticulous depictions of magical rites and their practitioners in Egypt's magical marketplace, which were usually dismissed or maligned by authors of the period, also are noteworthy.
These will not be the focus of the present essay, although they are crucial to understanding the historical and fictional worlds of the novel. Rather, I read the novel “along the bias grain” to interrogate understandings of race and the role of Blackness in Egyptian literature through the ambivalent role of Behita.Footnote 4 Behita's character in Zanouba is both pivotal and ephemeral. Her fate in the novel is as tragic as it is tangential. Behita is indispensable due to her knowledge of herbal abortifacients, her nimble negotiations with the spice merchant who sells them to her, and the role of her sacrifice in the plot. Yet, she is disposable—a character who remains undeveloped and stereotyped as a “superstitious, trickster Sudanese woman,” a common trope linked to a developing nexus of the racialization and criminalization of occult knowledge and practice alongside the enslavement of Africans.
Fact or Fiction? Out el Kouloub and the World of Zanouba
Hailing from the illustrious Demirdash family, Out El Kouloub's position in society made her well-situated to provide thick descriptions of the trials and tribulations of women's lives. The Demirdash were a wealthy family of Circassian origins that came to Egypt following the 1517 Ottoman conquest. They founded the Demirdashiyya, a branch of the Khalwati Sufi order.Footnote 5 Out el Kouloub was born at the turn of the 20th century and raised in a setting typical of the period's aristocratic harems. She was educated by private tutors within the home and learned multiple languages.Footnote 6 Her mother—half Moroccan, half French—hailed from Fez. Her father was the head of the ṭarīqa (order) from 1878 until his death in 1929. Out el Kouloub later played a pivotal role in the affairs of the Demerdashiyya, where she served as “the mother of the order.” She provided advice and comfort for the women who consulted the order and was even known as a conduit for women who wanted the blessing of the shaykh to help them conceive a male child.Footnote 7
The combined experiences of “harem life” and her role in the Demerdashiyya allowed Out el Kouloub to channel her knowledge of the hidden lives of Egyptian women into eight novels, offering unparalleled descriptions of how women wielded magic, herbal medicines, and fertility rites. Set in a moment in which magic and vernacular healing were the subject of scrutiny, anxiety, and criminalization, Zanouba catered to the orientalist fantasies of French readers and moralistic sensibilities of elite Egyptians. Egyptian political, medical, and religious authorities decried women's propensities for superstition (khurāfa) and embrace of “old wives’ medicine” (ṭibb al-rukka) during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Still, most Egyptians continued to consult occult healers and spiritual guides for their physical and spiritual ailments.Footnote 8 Women, especially Upper Egyptian and Black African women like Behita, were central figures in these “spiritual economies.”Footnote 9
Out el Kouloub's work is rich in faithful depictions of fertility rites, magical charms and talismans, holy shrines, and the occult practitioners that provided these services. Most Egyptian writing on superstition and women-centric magico-medical knowledge in the first half of the 20th century—whether fiction or nonfiction—was by men. Out el Kouloub's position as a woman, and particularly an elite woman with spiritual standing or baraka, provided her unique access to this world. Although Out el Kouloub described these practices in her novels, she did not endorse them. She used them to illustrate “how ignorance breeds fears and misconceptions and perpetuates mindless superstitions.”Footnote 10 Inspired by figures like Qasim Amin, Huda Shaʿarawi, and Shaykh Muhammad ʿAbduh, Out el Kouloub advocated for women's rights and proper schooling. Education, she believed, along with many of her contemporaries, would stamp out the superstitious beliefs that plagued Egyptian society.
Because Out el Kouloub depicted Egyptian women of all classes participating in the occult, her villainization of Black Sudanese women, like Behita, is conspicuous. Her work provides an example of how “superstitious” practices, and especially those believed to have African origins or that were performed by Black Africans, were raced and gendered. Egypt's history as an imperial force in Sudan haunts the pages of Zanouba. The majority—if not all—of the characters in Zanouba are in direct relationship with enslavement and empire. The text is replete with references to the Ottoman-Egyptian occupation of Sudan (1821–81), the Mahdist state, the Anglo-Egyptian condominium, and Egypt's role in the trans-Saharan slave trade.Footnote 11 Members of the family were directly engaged in the Anglo-Egyptian colonial service.Footnote 12 The novel reflects the pervasive presence of Egyptian imperialism in everyday life and among the Egyptian elite. The ramifications of Egypt's colonial role in Sudan ranged from the political to the domestic.
Zanouba's husband, Abdel Meguid, is the patriarch of a typical upper-middle-class Egyptian household at the turn of the century. It relied on the labor of numerous domestics who ranged from indentured Egyptian women hailing from rural areas of the Delta and Upper Egypt to enslaved and manumitted African women like Om Mohamed, their “robust Sudanese” cook. Two of Zanouba's co-wives, Gaulisar and Narguiss, were purchased by the family as young girls from Wakalat al-Jallaba, the slave market in Cairo. Abdel Meguid's father won Gaulisar, a Circassian, as a prize in a game of backgammon the day after she arrived from Istanbul.Footnote 13 He later gifted her to his son, believing them to be more compatible in age. Abdel Meguid's mother, Om Mahmood, purchased Narguiss, an Abyssinian, when she was only twelve years old. She recalls that the exact year was 1863, coinciding with the death of Egypt's sovereign, Wali Muhammad Sa`id Pasha.Footnote 14
Zanouba also offers glimpses into how Sudanese people were impacted and displaced by Egyptian and British colonial violence. At the climax of the novel, Zanouba's mother hires four Sudanese codias, zār priestesses, to perform a silent ritual to protect her new pregnancy after the forced miscarriage.Footnote 15 Out el Kouloub informs us that they fled to Egypt with their families “to escape the domination of Tayeh, the Mahdi.”Footnote 16 Zanouba's mother notes that they were but one example of many Sudanese families who settled in the village of ʿAbd al-Nabih outside of Cairo and now worked in the coffee house, boza, and zār trades.Footnote 17 It is these entangled realities of enslavement, manumission, displacement, and migration to urban areas of Egypt during the late 19th and early 20th centuries that contributed to the rise of occult economies and services dominated by Black Africans.Footnote 18 It also, in part, contributed to their racialization and criminalization. It is in this colonial and imperial context that the trope of the “superstitious, trickster Sudanese” developed.
The Superstitious, Trickster Sudanese
The trope of “the superstitious, trickster Sudanese” sits at the intersection of two tropes pervasive in Egyptian popular culture in the late 19th and 20th centuries: racist representations of Black African domestics and gendered and classed representations of “superstitious” practices. Scholars such as Eve Troutt Powell and Ifdal Elsaket have shown that in the period between World War I and the Free Officer's Coup in 1952 Egyptian theater, radio, and film were rife with blackface performances and antiblack portrayals of Sudanese and Nubians who were largely relegated to the roles of docile servants, bawwābs (doorkeepers), and “buffoons” for comic relief.Footnote 19 Beth Baron and Marwa Elshakry similarly highlight how racialized and sexualized images of Sudan as a woman filled Egypt's nationalist newspapers alongside scientific debates regarding the racial origins of Egyptians and Sudanese.Footnote 20 These depictions underscored Egypt's paternalist and imperialist claims to Sudan, founded on understandings of racial superiority through both biological and cultural “whiteness.”Footnote 21
Images of superstitious women, namely ignorant peasant women from Upper Egypt and gullible, simple-minded Egyptian mothers, also permeated the press and screen. Figures like Muhammad Hilmi Zayn al-Din and Malak Hifni Nasif warned their turn-of-the-20th-century readers that in the absence of proper schooling Egyptian women would fall prey to trickster fortune tellers, zār codias, and other charlatans.Footnote 22 In a recent article on the sensationalized news coverage of the murder trial of the infamous sisters Raya and Sakina, Nefertiti Takla has shown that the Egyptian media mobilized the duo's proximity to zār (and, therefore, Africanity) to racialize and villainize them.Footnote 23 Viola Shafik examined how these concerns of superstition manifested in Egyptian film well into the 1990s.Footnote 24 The fusion of stereotypes concerning docile, backward blackness and superstitious femininity shaped the characterization of Behita in Out al-Kouloub's Zanouba.
Egyptians viewed Black women as the most superstitious of all due to their Africanness, but also because of the many free and manumitted Black Africans engaging in occult work such as ḍarb al-raml (geomancy), ḍarb al-wadaʿ (shell divination), fatḥ al-kitāb (bibliomancy), and zār on the streets and in the marketplace.Footnote 25 Although the public role of marginalized groups in such spaces was commonplace, the presence of African women within the Egyptian household as a result of domestic slavery threatened many within the Egyptian elite. They feared the occult knowledge of their domestics and their affiliations with occult practitioners like zār codias could result in theft, the financial ruin of the household, uprisings among the servants, or even death.Footnote 26 Even so, Egyptian mistresses harnessed their domestics’ secret knowledges to obtain amulets to capture the eyes of new lovers, charms to tame cheating husbands, and herbs to enhance fertility and induce miscarriages, as we see in the case of Behita. Out el Kouloub tames her in Zanouba by depicting her as a deformed old woman who ultimately sacrifices herself out of devotion to her mistress, a choice that reveals the limits of the author's social critique.Footnote 27
The Paralysis of Blackness
Out el Kouloub's characterization of Behita is reminiscent of the “monstrous mammy” stereotype of the American South, as well as the trope of the “Magical Negro.”Footnote 28 These figures, usually possessing magical powers or mystical wisdom, appear in the plots of movies and novels with the sole purpose of helping the white protagonists find their true potential, and they often sacrifice themselves in the process. Out el Kouloub reveals little about Behita or her life outside of her role as a plot device to facilitate Zanouba's forced miscarriage and to allow the true villain of the story, Mashallah, to flee to the safety of her family home unpunished. She emphasizes Behita's generalized “blackness” and slave status by giving her a common name for enslaved Sudanese women.Footnote 29
Behita enters the novel after the news of Zanouba's pregnancy reaches Mashallah. Filled with rage and despair at the news of her new co-wife's pregnancy, Mashallah sends for her aunt, Nefissa, to console her.Footnote 30 Nefissa attempts to calm Mashallah, but ultimately reveals that she has heard of ways to make women miscarry “by the smell of herbs alone.”Footnote 31 She offers Mashallah the service of her Sudanese maid, who is familiar with the spice merchants in Cairo. It is implied here that Behita also is familiar with “old wives’” medicine (ṭibb al-rukka) and particularly with methods of abortion. Behita is the same age as Nefissa and, as we are told, “blindly devoted” to her.Footnote 32 Nefissa's father purchased her at the slave market in Cairo when she was just a girl as a “gift” and forever-indentured “playmate” for his daughter.Footnote 33 Sadly, the dangerous game of abortion that Nefissa tagged Behita into would be their last.
Although many aspects of her character are undeveloped, Out el Kouloub's physical descriptions of Behita are among the most detailed of any character in Zanouba. Before Behita even speaks, we encounter a lengthy paragraph conveying Mashallah's repugnance at the maid's physical appearance.Footnote 34 Behita's blackness and deformed appearance are the outward manifestation of an equally unsettling personality. Mashallah suspends her disgust for Behita only long enough to use her for her vindictive plot to force Zanouba's miscarriage. The jealous co-wife is forced to overcome her repulsion, but the reader is not—setting the stage for Behita's ultimate paralysis and disposal at the end of the novel.Footnote 35
Completing the trope of the Sudanese trickster, Out el Kouloub then takes great care to reveal Behita's cunning ways. Behita's only extensive verbal passages in the novel illustrate her talent for lying, her propensity for trickery, and her savvy of the magical marketplace. Upon her arrival to Matariyya, Behita proudly presents Mashallah with “seven tiny packages wrapped in pink butcher paper,” containing the requisite herbs.Footnote 36 Mashallah tries to pay her with one gold coin, but Behita “looks at the money with disdain, responding: ‘One guinea? I paid four to have this potion prepared and another to have the herbs ground! Three of these herbs came all the way from India and one is from Ethiopia. If you knew what trouble I went to. . .!”Footnote 37
Behita continues to boast about how she tricked the spice merchant into giving her abortifacient herbs by weaving an elaborate tale of woe about a fictional daughter whose husband threatened to leave her for another wife due to her frailty. Behita knew that the composition of herbs the spice merchant would prescribe to “put some flesh on [the girl's] bones” were the same as those that could be used to induce a miscarriage.Footnote 38 Her monologue concludes with an explanation that she also successfully haggled with the merchant for a better price, stating that her cunning was only a demonstration of her devotion: “I only had your interest at heart my lady.” Mashallah is unimpressed by Behita's story and convinced that the maid is “stealing her blind.”Footnote 39 However, she pays Behita and adds a tip to ensure that she returns to execute the plan, a portrayal that further emphasizes that Behita would do anything for money.
Egyptian readers of Zanouba would have been quite familiar with trope of the superstitious, trickster Sudanese. The trope was likely legible to the broader francophone readership as well, attesting to the transnational legibility of the period's antiblack stereotypes. Yet, the composition of Behita's character reveals that this stereotype was rooted in the harsh realities of life for Black African women in Cairo. The horrors of capture, transport to urban centers like Cairo, Asyut, and Qina, and the trauma of being sold in the slave market are well documented. For enslaved, manumitted, and free Sudanese, Abyssinians, Nubians, and Takarna, neither the homes where they worked nor the streets of urban cities were guaranteed to be safe. They were abused, raped, forced to abort pregnancies, and even killed by their masters and mistresses.Footnote 40 It is no surprise then that Behita had a knowledge of abortifacients and the sometimes less than honest ways one might have had to procure them from suspicious spice merchants. Their station allowed—or rather, required—increased mobility and access to such spaces when compared with elite Egyptian women. They ran errands for the families they served, haggled on their behalf in the marketplace, sent secret messages, and facilitated clandestine meetings. But increased mobility came with increased danger, as blackness was conspicuous in public.Footnote 41 They risked harassment and even kidnapping by slave traders who would resell them within Egypt or smuggle them out of the country. What kind of harassment or trouble did Behita experience on her travels between Nefissa's home and the souk and on the road to Matariyya alone? These were the aspects of her subjectivity hidden from Out el Kouloub's otherwise incisive gaze. Her uneasy alliance with Mashallah obviously provided no safety, as the author leaves us with a final image of Behita paralyzed, unable to speak, and no longer of use to her supposed family.Footnote 42
Out el Kouloub's silence about what might have become of Behita after she ceased to serve her purpose is also revealing. Even in death, the bodies of enslaved Africans became vehicles for the self-realization of those who owned them. As the practice of dissection at medical schools increased, cadavers became scarce and highly valued, as ordinary people and their families would not assent to such a desecration. They might have imagined dissection as an affront to Muslim sensibilities, but the outcome ultimately resembled practices in Europe and the United States.Footnote 43 In Ottoman Istanbul, the Imperial Medical School relied on enslaved Africans for dissections, even after the abolition of the African slave trade in 1847. Slave dealers (esirciler) could claim a 30 kuruş reward (ihbariye) for notifying the government of dead Black people (fevt olan zenci cariye ve gulamlar) to serve as cadavers “as before” (kemakan) in the medical school.Footnote 44 This enabled both the enslavers and the medical school to extract one last bit of value from the bodies of the enslaved and conveniently dispose of the embodied evidence of their own inhumanity. In Cairo, the French director of Qasr al-ʿAyni Medical School, Clot Bey, overcame his students’ prejudice against dissection by promising them that that he would never take his scalpel to a Muslim cadaver. Footnote 45 Instead, the class unanimously agreed to use the bodies of enslaved Black soldiers who they believed to be “idolators” as they were “neither Christian, nor circumcised.”Footnote 46 Clot Bey and his students quietly procured bodies for their lessons, sneaking them into the amphitheater through a secret door.Footnote 47 As a result, enslaved Africans were the first people dissected at Qasr al-ʿAyni.
Khaled Fahmy famously reflected this in his use of Russian painter Nicholas Strekalovsky's 1930s portrait, “The First Dissection Lesson in Egypt, 1829,” on the cover of In Quest of Justice.Footnote 48 The painting features the image of a Black cadaver stretched out before rows of students in the auditorium of the medical school. Yet Fahmy stopped short of analyzing this racial component of the emerging biopolitics in the introduction of the text. Liat Kozma has used records from the Majlis al-Ahkam to show the role that new methods of autopsy evolving from these dissections played in the Cairo police's investigations of the abuse, kidnapping, and murder of enslaved women.Footnote 49 Although the police were equipped to handle such cases, Kozma demonstrates that many of the legal rights remained with slave owners, resulting in their acquittal, with many cases never being brought to court. The “quest of justice” in Egypt had clear limits.
Nonetheless, although Out el Kouloub and her Egyptian readers may have wanted to imagine that their African domestics were willing to sacrifice themselves for their masters, this is one case where fiction and the archival record do not align. Scholars working with the Egyptian and Ottoman archives have cited numerous cases of unruly enslaved women and men and their voices—however constrained. They similarly provide glimpses of their lives once freed.Footnote 50 With so many opportunities for Behita to resist in real life, why did Out el Kouloub choose to betray her in the imaginary, and often emancipatory, world of fiction?
The final image of Behita in Zanouba is of her paralyzed on a cot. She lies abandoned, rendered useless, and destined for an uncertain but decidedly dark fate. “Behita has been silenced forever,” notes one of the servants.Footnote 51 Behita is not mentioned again. The novel, with almost one hundred pages left, plows on. The reader is swept up in Zanouba's attempts to get pregnant again and the family's despair when she gives birth to a girl, a tragedy rooted in the experience of Out el Kouloub, her mother, and no doubt many other Egyptian women. Should a reader sympathetic to that experience be satisfied with the abrupt ending to Behita's story?
It would be easy to read and teach Zanouba as a realistic depiction of women's lives in a typical upper-middle-class Egyptian household at the turn of the 20th century. In many ways it may be, but it is only complete with our interrogation of Out el Kouloub's choice to sacrifice Behita for the purposes of her plot—making her another Sudanese victim paralyzed in servitude, cast as yet another shadow in Egyptian artistic representations.Footnote 52 This choice completes the picture of racialized hierarchies among the women in her book, and it reflects the violence and trauma of being an enslaved Sudanese woman at the bottom rungs of that hierarchy. As a talented writer, reformer, and advocate for women's rights, Out el Kouloub's betrayal of Behita coldly dispels any myths of true intimacies between masters and the enslaved within elite Egyptian households.
Interest in the histories of slavery, race, and blackness has recently burgeoned in the field of Middle East and Ottoman studies. The case of Behita provides a cautionary reminder for scholars writing and reconstructing the lives at the heart of these stories. It is a reminder that how we, as scholars, tell the (hi)stories of Black women and other marginalized historical subjects is always a choice—no matter the limits of sources we may have access to. As historian Jennifer Marie Johnson has stressed, “searching slavery's archive for enslaved and free Black lives and knowledge requires additional labor from historians.”Footnote 53 She joins a growing field of Black women historians of slavery who call for work that engages in “an accountable historical practice that challenges the known and the unknowable.”Footnote 54
These scholars also provide methodological tools for reading and writing history that push these boundaries and promote care in retrieving Black lives, often from archives—methods such as “reading along the bias grain,” “critical fabulation,” and “disruptive poetics.”Footnote 55 Not unlike the once denigrated occult knowledge of women like Behita, these are not discursive magic tricks. They are powerful pairings of rigorous historical and archival research with critical imagination and fictional narrative to refuse the limitations of the archive and highlight the historical subjects it disadvantages without reproducing its epistemic violence. These lessons should be heeded not only by historians of slavery or scholars of Black life. They are important, if not critical, for the field of the Middle East studies and indispensable in its late attempt to grapple with the history of anti-blackness. This is particularly true in light of increased state policing of archival access, the destruction of archives due to political violence, and the sustained chokehold of state-centered histories on the field. Behita was betrayed once already. To allow her, and others like her, to continue to be betrayed in fiction or in history would be the true crime.
