Egyptian classic movies- ALBAB-ALMAFTOUH- faten Hamama and Saleh Selim

12 (October 1996)
From
Remembering Latifa al-Zayyat

By Amal Amireh

The Open Door to a Glorious Future

"Al-Bab al-Maftooh" (The Open Door , 1960), al-Zayyat’s first (and for a long time only) novel, deals
with the multiple layers of experience. While not strictly autobiographical, the author revisits her
university days and creates a heroine after her own heart. The novel tells the story of Layla, a young
woman from the Cairean middle class. Layla’s psychological, social, and political growth takes place
in the context of the years from 1946 to 1956 — years that witnessed the revolt against the British
and the Palace, the Free Officer’s Revolution of 1952, Jamal Abdul Nasser’s nationalization of the
Suez Canal, and the Israeli-British-French attack that followed.

Layla’s personal travails begin when she menstruates for the first time, an event which brings tears of
humiliation and distress to her father’s eyes. Determined to guard his honor against any future stains,
he restricts his daughter’s movement and arranges for her to marry her cousin.

For al-Zayyat, the father represents not only an older generation unable to cope with the realities of
life, but also a rotten middle class with no future vision to guide the country. Layla, however, is the
New Woman who, thanks to the education her class gave her, developed a different sense of self from
the one prescribed by her conservative upbringing. One of the women characters describes her
generation’s dilemma this way: “Our mothers knew their situation, whereas we are lost. We do not
know if we are in a harem or not, or whether love is forbidden or allowed. Our parents say its
forbidden, yet the government-run radio sings day and night about love. Books tell women they are
free, and yet if a woman really believes that, a catastrophe will happen and her reputation will be
blackened.”

Layla begins to feel empowered when she takes part in anti-British demonstrations: “She was fused
in a whole, pushing her forward, embracing her and protecting her. She shouted anew in a voice
different from hers, a voice which unified her being with a collective one.” Eventually, she becomes a
school teacher in Port Said. When the Suez Canal war occurs in 1956 she participates and gains the
courage that allows her to break up with her conventional fiancee and attach herself to a
revolutionary colleague.

"The Open Door" is a pioneering work on many levels. According to the critic Farida al-Naqash it “was
an expression of a new wave in the Arabic novel, one that combines poetic realism with committed
literature.” In probing the relationship between nationalism and feminism — in showing their
interdependence — al-Zayyat dealt with a complex issue that is still a hot topic of debate among Arab
feminists. The novel expresses the optimism of the post-revolutionary period, when a young
generation of Egyptian men and women looked forward to a hopeful future.

The same novel is now “an impossibility,” al-Zayyat said a few years ago. When she wrote it she
shared with her audience a common language and a common vision. But things have changed.
According to her, “roads to salvation are blocked; the common ground of shared values seem to
break down into multiple different sets of values according to the varied social strata; the common
sensibility and its language is no more; people lacking national unity are divided and subdivided until
each is turned into an insular island.” One Egyptian critic recently wrote that his female students don’
t see themselves in the heroine of "The Open Door. They no longer believe that what Layla achieves
by the end of the book is possible for them.

"The Open Door" was simultaneously a product of its time and ahead of it. This is perhaps why the
cinematic version of the novel, directed by Henry Barakat and starring Fatin Hamama and Mahmoud
Mursy, was a commercial failure when it was first released in 1962. Barakat attributes this failure to
the audience’s opposition to the theme of women’s liberation (even though the film alters the ending
by showing that the change in the heroine is brought about by the man with whom she falls in love).
But the film is well-received now whenever it is shown on Egyptian television, which probably reflects
the audience’s nostalgia for the by-gone time of high revolutionary tide.

To review full topic about Latifa El- Zayatt
http://www.aljadid.com/features/RememberingLatifaal-Zayyat.html