Raphael Cormack - Midnight in Cairo: The Divas of Egypts Roaring 20s

MIDNIGHT
IN CAIRO

The Divas of Egypts Roaring 20s

Raphael Cormack

W.W. NORTON & COMPANY

Independent Publishers Since 1923

I N THE LATE 1980s, the Egyptian writer Louis Awad looked back on his student days in Cairo between the wars. In particular, he remembered the nights he spent in the cafs of Cairos nightlife district, Ezbekiyya.

All you had to do was sit in one of the bars or cafs that looked out onto Alfi Bey Street, like the Parisiana or the Taverna, and tens of different salesmen would come up to you, one selling lottery tickets, another selling newspapers, another selling eggs and simit bread, another selling combs and shaving cream, the next shining shoes, and the next offering pistachios. There were also people who would play a game Odds or Evens, performing monkeys, clowns, men with pianolas who performed with their wives, fire eaters, and people impersonating Charlie Chaplins walk. Among all these, there was always someone trying to convince you that he would bring you to the most beautiful girl in the world, who was only a few steps away.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the centre of nightlife in Ezbekiyya was Emad al-Din Streetlong and wide, with a tram line down the middle running north to the suburbs of Shubra and Abbasiyya. The intersection with Alfi Bey Street, where Louis Awad used to sit in the bars and cafs, was at the southern end of the action. There stood the grand Kursaal music hall, owned by the Italian impresario Augusto Dalbagni, its two-storey entrance topped with stars and crescent moons to imitate Egypts flag, where touring European acts and local Egyptians alike performed. Down into Alfi Bey Street was an ever-changing series of venues, which in the early days of this areas prominence included the grand Printania Theatre and, beside it, the Abbaye des Roses music hall. In the mid-1920s a new form of entertainment emerged when the venue became a court where the Basque sport of pelotaa ball game similar to squash or fiveswas a popular late-night attraction, with the main match starting at midnight.

Emad al-Din Street looking north

Farther north up Emad al-Din Street, the four grand domes of the khedivial buildings, finished in 1910, towered over the street from both sides. In this complex of apartments and offices, the Greek poet George Seferis used to work in the 1940s. In one of his poems he recalled the car horns, trams, rumbling of car engines and screech of brakes that used to greet him on his walks. The street was lined with cinemas: the American Cosmograph, Empire, Obelisk, Violet, and more. In the 1910s and 20s they ran a selection of foreign films with intertitles (aka title cards) in French, English, Arabic, and Greek and, sometimes, with live musical accompanimentthe Gaumont Palace featured a small orchestra led by the famous violinist Naoum Poliakine. Just before the junction with Kantaret al-Dikka, the street that led towards the red-light district to the east, was Youssef Wahbis Ramses Theatre, where his troupe put on a selection of Arabic tragedy, comedy, and melodrama.

Across Kantaret al-Dikka, on the other side of the junction, was the European-style Casino de Paris cabaret. One Egyptian journal described it enthusiastically in 1923 as offering exquisite Parisian girls, who come on stage to interpret the latest numbers from Paris, an agreeable atmosphere, fine champagne, and nothing lacking to give a total illusion of one of the Montmartre cabarets. A more cynical writer said that with its walls hung with pink paper, its stage which is not much more than platform, and its bar of varnished wood... the Casino de Paris, in fact, much more resembled one of those small clubs that flourish in austere provincial towns, to the terror of the virtuous bourgeoisie. This notorious venue was run by Marcelle Langlois, a Frenchwoman with strikingly dyed red hair, who was notorious among anti-prostitution campaigners as a procurer of chorus girls for wealthy clients. Her activities, both in and out of sight, earned her enough money to buy a large chateau in France.

Just past this European-style cabaret were a series of music halls and theatres that showed, in the words of one American journalist, continuous three to five hour shows in Arabic and English... heavily peppered with bawdy jokes and catered to local Egyptians and occasional tourists. There was the Majestic, the Bijou Palace, and the Egyptiana. In these theatres and music halls, the Franco-Arab revue flourished. It was a uniquely Cairene genre: a selection of short farces, songs, and dances, all in a mixture of Arabic and French, bringing together in one night of entertainment Egyptian actors and dancers with performers from the music halls of Europe.

Today, Emad al-Din Street has retained only traces of this world. There is just one theatre still working on the street, a derelict cinema stands on the site of the Casino de Paris, and the Scheherazade is the only major cabaret still operating in the area; the others have either moved out to Giza or behind nondescript doorways in the side streets of downtown Cairo. But in its heyday, Cairos nightlife could rival that in Paris, London, or Berlin. Any resident of Egypts capital city in the early twentieth century could have claimed, with justification, to be living in one of the great cities of the world, at the centre of many different cultures.

The citys population had come from an amazing variety of places across Europe, Africa, and Asia. Some people (mostly the Europeans) enjoyed pampered lives with lucrative jobs in Africas latest boom town. Others struggled, working in menial jobs or negotiating the growing criminal underworld, trying anything to stay afloat. People seeking better opportunities lived alongside refugees from Europe who came in the wake of the First World War. Spies and political agitators from as far away as Russia and Japan crossed the paths of sybaritic aristocrats, who whiled away their afternoons in hotel bars.

This history of cosmopolitan Egypt is memorably recorded in the novels, poems, and memoirs of Europeans, most of them living in Alexandria. From the Greek poet Constantine Cavafys melancholy evocations of Mediterranean caf life to the rich, chocolate-cake prose of Lawrence Durrells epic Alexandria Quartet, these writers created some of the most enduring images of twentieth-century Egypt. But, far from the elite literary salons of Alexandria, another story unfoldedless well known but just as excitingin the Arabic theatres, cafs, and clubs of Cairo. In the transgressive nightlife of central Cairo, with all the freedom that came with performing for an audience of strangers, rigid identities and conventional barriers that separated different nationalities were more fluid than anywhere else.

Even a cursory attempt to list the stars of this period reveals the huge variety of their backgrounds, whether religious, national, or cultural. Some became legends, others have been forgotten, but they all played their part. There were Egyptians of all kinds. Many of the earliest star actresses, like Nazla Mizrahi or the Dayan sisters, were Jewish; others were Christian or Muslim. Some performers came from farther up the Nile. One dance hall in the 1930s boasted a troupe of Sudanese dancers, and among the many young actresses trying to break into the big time in the 1920s was Aida al-Habashiyya, who, to judge from her name, must have been of either Ethiopian or Sudanese descent (