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Sirat Al-Ghawazi, Epilogue Part 4

Article Subtitle- real description of content-make keyword heavy if possible

by Edwina
posted October, 2011
previously published in Habibi Magazine vol.5 #6 (Zalot Era)

 
 
 
In the 19th century, as in the 20th, the great temples and other remains of Ancient Egypt near the shores of the Nile at Luxor and its next-door village, Karnak, were the main goal of tourists travelling south of Cairo. And then as now, the long evenings of Upper Egypt, after darkness and tired feet put an end to the day's exploration of tombs and temples, prompted foreign visitors to seek out 'the other Egypt,' the Egypt of pashas and fallahin, moulids and ghawazi. Charles Dudley Warner, in his 1876 publication, My Winter on The Nile, describes the 'Ghawazee quarter' on the edge of Luxor, and a dinner party for tourists with ghawazi dancing. While one can no longer see elite ghawazi dancing "in Cairo, in the grand harems on great festival occasions," as Warner's contemporary travel-book author Charles Leland wrote, it is still possible to attend dancing parties in Luxor not too unlike that described below, and there is still a quiet little street on the edge of Luxor known to locals as the domain of the Maazin family, whose daughters, nieces and cousins have the virtual monopoly of such entertainments...

"On the outskirts of the mud-cabins we pass through the weekly market, a motley assemblage of country-folks and produce, camels, donkeys, and sheep. It is close by the Ghawazee quarter, where is a colony of a hundred or more of these dancing-girls. They are always conspicuous among Egyptian women by their greater comeliness and gay apparel. They wear red and yellow gowns, many tinkling ornaments of silver and gold, and their eyes are heavily darkened with kohl. I don't know what it is in this kohl, that it gives woman such a wicked and dangerous aspect. They come out to ask for backsheesh in a brazen but probably intended to be a seductive manner; they are bold, but some of them rather well-looking...

" ... when there is so much lingual difficulty in intercourse, the demonstrations of civility must be mainly overt, and in fact they are mostly illuminations and 'fantasias.' Almost every boat [the tourist boats, or dahabeahs, which bring many tourists to Luxor and which many use as hotels during their stay] once in the course of its stay, and usually upon some natal day or in honor of some arrival, will be beautifully illuminated and display fireworks... The people of
Luxor respond with illuminations in the houses, to which they add barbarous music and the kicking and posturing of the Ghawazees...
 
"Perhaps we reached the high-water mark of this gaiety in an entertainment given us by Ali Moorad Effendi, the American consular agent, in return for a dinner on 'the dahabeeh… The entertainment consisted of a dinner and a 'fantasia'...
 
"During the feast there is music by performers in the adjoining hall, music in minor, barbaric strains insisted on with the monotonous nonchalance of the Orient… At the end of the courses water is brought for us to lave our hands, and coffee and chibooks [long Eastern pipes] are served...
 
"The Ghawazees have meantime arrived; we hear a burst of singing occasionally with the wail of the instruments. The dancing is to be in the narrow hall of the house... At the far end are seated on the floor the musicians, with two stringed instruments, a tambourine and a darabooka. That which answers for a violin has two strings of horsehair, stretched over a cocoanut-shell; the bowstring, which is tightened by the hand as it is drawn, is of horsehair. The music is certainly exciting, harassing, plaintive, complaining; the very monotony of it would drive one wild in time. Behind the musicians is a dark cloud of turbaned servants and various priveleged retainers of the house. In front of the musicians sit the Ghawazees, six girls, and an old woman with parchment skin and twinkling eyes, who has been a famous dancer in her day. They are waiting a little wearily, and from time to time one of them throws out the note or two of a song, as if the music were beginning to work in her veins. The spectators are grouped at the entrance of the hall and seated on chairs down each side, leaving but a narrow space for the dancers between; and there are dusky faces peering in at the door...
 
"The leading dancer is dressed in a flaring gown of red and figured silk, a costly Syrian dress; she is fat, rather comely, but coarsely uninteresting, although she is said to have on more jewelry than any other dancing-girl in Egypt; her abundant black hair is worn long and in strands thickly hung with gold coins; her breast is covered with necklaces of gold-work and coins; and a mass of heavy twinkling silver ornaments hangs about her waist. A third dancer is in an almost equally striking gown of yellow, and wears also much coin; she is a Pharaonic beauty, with a soft skin and the real Oriental eye and profile. The dresses of all are plainly cut, and straight-waisted, like an ordinary calico gown of a milkmaid. They wear no shawls or any other Oriental wrappings, and dance in their stocking-feet.
 
"At a turn in the music, the girl in red and the girl in yellow stand up; for an instant they raise their castanets till the time of the music is caught, and then start forward, with less of languor and a more skipping movement than we expected; and they are not ungraceful as they come rapidly down the hall, throwing the arms aloft and the feet forward, to the rattle of the castanets... In mid-advance they stop; face each other, chassee, retire, and again come further forward, stop, and the peculiar portion of the dance begins, which is not dancing at all, but a quivering, undulating motion given to the body, as the girl stands with feet planted wide apart. The feet are still, the head scarecely stirs, except with an almost imperceptible snake-like movement, but the muscles of the body to the hips quiver in time to the monotonous music, in muscular thrills, in waves running down, and at intervals extending below the waist. Sometimes one side of the body quivers while the other is perfectly still, and then the whole frame, for a second, shares in the ague. It is certainly an astonishing muscular performance; but you could not call it either graceful or pleasing...
 
"After standing for a brief space, with the body throbbing and quivering, the castanets all the time held above the head in sympathetic throbs, the dancers start forward, face each other, pass, pirouette, and take some dancing steps, retire, advance and repeat the earthquake performance. This is kept up a long time, and with wonderful endurance, without change of figure; but sometimes the movements are more rapid, when the music hastens, and more passion is shown. But five minutes of it is as good as an hour. Evidently the dance is nothing except with a master, with an actress who shall abandon herself to the tide of feeling which the music suggests and throw herself into the full passion of it; who knows how to tell a story by pantomime, and to depict the woes of love and despair. All this needs grace, beauty, and genius. Few dancing-girls have either. An old resident of Luxor complains that the dancing is not at all what it was twenty years ago, that the old fire and art seem to be lost ...

"During the intervals, the girls sing to the music; the singing is very wild and barbaric. The song is in priase of the Night, a love-song consisting of repeated epithets:
 
'O the Night!
nothing is so lovely as the Night!
O my heart!
O my soul!
O my liver!
My love he passed my door,
and saw me not;
O the night!
How lovely is the Night! '
 
"The strain is minor, and there is a wail in the voices which stridently chant to the twanging strings. Is it only the echo of ages of sin in these despairing voices?... Evidently the fat girl in red is a prey to no such misgiving, as she comes bouncing down the line, and flings herself into her ague fit...
 
"While the dance goes on, pipes, coffee, and brandy are frequently passed; the dancers swallow the brandy readily. The house is illuminated, and the entertainment ends with a few rockets from the terrace."

Warner also mentions the ghawazi of Esneh, a village not far south of Luxor sometimes included in the tourist itinerary by virtue of its ancient pharaonic temple:
 
"The coffee-shops of Esneh are many, some respectable and others decidedly otherwise. The former are the least attractive, being merely long and dingy mud-apartments, in which the visitors usually sit on the floor and play at draughts. The coffee-houses near the river have porticoes and pleasant terraces in front, and look not unlike some picturesque Swiss or Italian wine-shops. The attraction there seems to be the Ghawazees or dancing-girls, of whom there is a large colony here, the colony consisting of a tribe. All the family act as procurers for the young women, who are usually married. Their dress is an extraordinary combination of stripes and colors, red and yellow being favorites, which harmonize well with their dark, often black, skins, and eyes heavily shaded with kohl... They say that their race is allied in origin to that of the people called gypsies, with whom many of their customs are common. The men are tinkers, blacksmiths, or musicians, and the women are the ruling element in the band; the husband is subject to the wife... "
- Warner. C. Dudley. My Winter on the Nile, Boston, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1876, pp. 213, 353-354, 376-377, 379.382.

As the 19th century draws to a close, descriptions of the ghawazi become fewer and fewer. This is in part due to a sharp decline in the number of travel books published about Egypt in the early 20th century, but there are clearly other, less known, causes at work as well. Perhaps 'the ghawazi' - those of Cairo at least - slowly rid themselves of this epithet and evolved their costume to become the 'belly dancers' of the mid-20th century. Two of the last 19th century references to the ghawazi of Cairo by name indicate that the influence of the Western world had already wrought considerable change upon the ghawazi:
 
"Cairo abounds in Egyptian cafes, where dances by the soi-disant members of the Ghawazee tribe are the sole attractions. They are, however, altogether lacking in local colour, and are, in fact, run by enterprising Greeks and Levantines for European visitors, and the performance is as banal and vulgar as at any cafe chantant in Antwerp or Amsterdam. The whole show consists of a few wailing musicians sitting on a raised platform at one end of the cafe, accompanying the endless gyrations of a stout young woman of unprepossessing features, who postures in particularly ungraceful and unedifying attitudes. Then her place is taken by another, equally ill-favored and obese, who goes through the same interminable gyrations, to be relieved in her turn; and this goes on hour after hour. This strange 'unvariety show' is, nevertheless, one of the established sights of Cairo, and is frequented in great numbers by tourists. Genuine performances of these dancing girls are seldom seen in Cairo, except occasionally at weddings among the rich Cairenes; and, in fact, the public dances of the Ghawazee are forbidden by the authorities. They can, however, be "seen at most of the towns of the Upper Nile Valley, especially at Keneh and Esneh."
- Reynolds-Ball, E.A., Cairo of Yesterday and Today. Boston, Dana
Estes & Co., 1897, pp. 191-192.

"The female dancers, or Ghawazi.... were formerly one of the chief curiosities of Egypt, but for some years past they have been prohibited from performing in the streets. Really good dancers are said to be now rare, but may still be seen occasionally in the cafes chantants in Cairo. The Hawal, or men in female attire, who frequently dance at festivities instead of the Ghawazi, present a most repulsive appearance." "
- Baedeker, Karl, Egypt: Handbook for Travellers, Leipsic. 1898, p. xxxviii.

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