Midnight in Cairo by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: Liveright

Chapter 7

THE SINGER, THE BABY, AND THE BEY

ONE DAY IN EARLY 1924, the young singer and actress Fatima Sirri received a phone call. This call triggered a series of events that would come to define the rest of her life. When she picked up the phone, she heard the voice of Ibrahim Heblawi Bey, an eminent lawyer and politician. He was calling on behalf of his friend Hoda Shaarawi, the hero of those legendary women’s protests of the 1919 revolution. Since then she had become the main figurehead of the women’s movement in Egypt, setting up the Egyptian Feminist Union in 1923. That same year, Hoda had caused a stir by publicly removing her face veil at Cairo station in a symbolic protest against the life of seclusion that was imposed on aristocratic women. Hoda Shaarawi was also the member of an important and aristocratic Egyptian family that owned a famous villa in central Cairo near the Egyptian Museum and whose male members were actively involved in the country’s high politics. On the phone that day, Ibrahim Heblawi told Fatima that Hoda was throwing a party at her famous villa, and she wanted someone to sing for her guests. Heblawi mentioned that the singer would be paid a decent amount, 20 Egyptian pounds, and after a little persuading (she had to reschedule another gig), Fatima agreed to perform.

Fatima Sirri’s career had so far been successful but largely unremarkable, at least by the standards of some other celebrities of the period. As usual, little is certain about her early life; it seems that she came from a middle-class family, married in her teens, had two children, and then divorced. However, during the marriage Fatima’s husband, who was a music lover, hired the composer Dawoud Hosni to give her singing lessons. After the divorce, he proved to be a vital contact in the entertainment industry. Dawoud, in the early 1920s, was among the most prolific composers in Cairo’s nightclub scene. After Sayyid Darwish died in 1923, Dawoud wrote music for almost every singer and musical troupe in the city. His songs and comic operas came to dominate Ezbekiyya, and Fatima had starring roles in many of them—including an operatic version of Samson and Delilah and the new opera Hoda—a fantastical love story about the daughter of the king of the jinn (“spirits”) falling in love with a mortal Egyptian.

After her early success in the theatre, Fatima moved into cabarets too, singing taqtuqas to the rowdy audiences in the Bosphore Casino or onstage at the Santi restaurant (a Cairo institution located in Ezbekiyya Gardens). She also signed a multi-song deal with Odeon Records. When Fatima got the phone call inviting her to perform at Hoda Shaarawi’s party, she may not have been the most sought-after artist in Cairo, but she was certainly in the upper echelons of the city’s singers.

The night of the party, Fatima went to the Shaarawis’ villa, sang her set, and left with enough time to do another gig that evening at Youssef Wahbi’s Ramses Theatre.

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