THE GENERAL'S NEW CLOTHES I: ATALLAH

Translation

The first translations of Shakespeare's plays were undertaken at
a time when a nascent theatrical movement was taking place in the
Islamic world. Thus the early renderings of the dramatic works were
concerned with performance and audience, i.e., with the oral and
lived experience rather than the textual and academic aspects of
the work. The most celebrated and best-known translation of
Othello is that of Khalil Mutran (1872-1949), the Lebanese-born
poet who immigrated to Egypt. He translated Othello at the specific
request of George Abyad-actor, director and head of the theatrical
troupe known by his name-who asked for an Arabic rendering
of the Shakespearean drama of the Moor. Mutran was reluctant
at first, but when he attended Abyad's performance of
Sophocles' Oedipus Rex he was sufficiently impressed to embark on
the translation (Mutran 3). The play was performed in the Cairo
Opera House on March 30, 1912. Abyad had returned to Egypt
the year before, after a stay in France where he had learned the
fashionable mannerist French style of acting. This style did not
contribute to the success of the play (Adham 299). Mutran's translation,
which was to become the translation of reference for the
coming six or seven decades, was essentially based not on the original,
but on a French version of Othello by Georges Duval (Badawi,
"Shakespeare" 189).
The characters in Mutran's translation, apart from Othello,
kept their original names, approximating the French pronunciation.
The protagonist's name, however, was changed to 'Utayl, on
the grounds that it had to be an Arab name, not a European name,
since he was a Moor. Thus Othello, pronounced by Mutran as
Otello-following the French reading-was seen as the deformation
of a possible Arabic name. Mutran argues in his introduction
to the play that there are two Arabic names that could have been
the original name: 'Atallah (literally, "gift of God/Allah") or 'Utayl (the
diminutive form of 'Atil, which means "unadorned by
jewelry"). He concludes that it must be the latter, since the Arabic
nominative declension of the name is "'Utaylu," which phonetically
echoes "Othello" (3-4). Mutran's argument handles the
philological dimension as well as the cultural dimension: it dismisses
the first option ('Atallah) because the name is not found in
the Maghrib where Othello comes from. Furthermore, the second
option ('Utayl) is probable, Mutran argues, because diminutives
are endearing forms of naming, such as the Arabs often gave to
blacks, including our protagonist.
Mutran's version is presented to readers as Arabization 
(ta'rib), and not as translation (tarjamah), and the translator devotes a
lengthy paragraph to explaining how Shakespeare himself seems
to reflect the Arab spirit-thus Mutran not only appropriates the
protagonist of the play, but also naturalizes its author. He does not
appeal to the "universal" dimension of Shakespeare, but argues
specifically on the grounds of the English bard's Arab rhetorical
sensibility:
In Shakespeare, there is doubtless something Arabic, and it is more evident than
in, say, Victor Hugo. Has he read our language or was it transmitted to him in
some accurate translation? I don't know. But between him and us there are puzzling
and numerous common features. He has our audacity for metaphor and its
manipulation. And he has the same predilection for abrupt changes without prior
preparation of preliminaries, pushing you suddenly from one intention to another,
leaving you to ponder and find the link. He also has our infatuation with
hyperbole which is probably used and sensed by only those writers and readers
who have imaginative intensity and defiance, as it is often with Orientals. 
On the whole, there is in the writing of Shakespeare a Bedouin spirit
which is expressed in the continuous return to innate nature. (7-8)
Besides dwelling on the affinities of Shakespeare with the Arabs
and restoring the "correct" Arabic name of the hero, Mutran is
also concerned with stylistic issues. He reflects in his introduction
on which style to adopt for his translation. This echoes the ongoing
debate on the language of theater in a nation where the spoken
language diverges from the written one, and where the vernacular
and the literary idioms are not identical. Mutran emphatically
rejects the use of a colloquial idiom, asserting that the vernacular
has "shattered the unity of the [Arab] nation" (8). He also rejects
the traditional Arabic rhetorical style, since such plays ought to be
written, he says, to be understood and made use of. His rejection
of the overwrought style that is practically incomprehensible isjustified
by appealing to authority. He cites a saying (hadith) by the
Prophet Muhammad: "I have been ordered to address people
according to their comprehension" (Mutran 8). He therefore opts
for an intermediate style: literary but accessible, with the structure
of sentences evoking the conversational rather than the ceremonial.
His mode of translation, as he maintains, is loyal to the "original"
except when syntax and linguistic conventions require
transformation (9). This self-consciousness about style in drama
reflects an anxiety concerning the appropriate language on stage
in a culture characterized by diglossia, where a dichotomy between
the spoken and written language exists. Mutran's position
demonstrates a concern for issues related to performance as well
as to textuality, and he uses religious discourse to justify his use of
a non-classical idiom for the secular text he is translating.
A more recent and more accomplished translation of Othello was
undertaken by Jabra Ibrahim Jabra (1920-94), a highly qualified
Palestinian poet, novelist, painter, critic, and translator who had
lived in Iraq since the partition of Palestine in the late 1940s. His
translation has come out in several editions and printings (in
Baghdad, Beirut, and Kuwait). In his introduction, one senses his
acute awareness of the entrenched Mutran version which he is
supposed to surpass. Not the least ofJabra's advantages is that he
translated from English. Still, he feels called upon to explain why
he has changed the names of the characters as commonly known
in the Arab world since the Mutran translation. Except for
Othello, Jabra transliterates them to reflect the English pronunciation.
Although Jabra does not agree with Mutran's explanation
of the Arab origin of the name Othello, he still feels he must adhere
to Mutran's legacy on this score. The hero-and by extension
the title of the play-retains the name of'Utayl.
Jabra's introduction gives the source of Othello (Cinthio's
Hecatommithi, 1565) as well as the textual history of the play. Furthermore,
he opts to preface his translation with A. C. Bradley's
famous study of Othello that figured in his Shakespearean Tragedy
(1904)-a study Jabra sees as essential to understanding the
drama of the Venetian Moor. Jabra also translates the first section
of the editor's introduction to the Arden edition of Othello, M. R.
Ridley's "The 'Double Time Scheme"' (Jabra, 'Utayl 9-66).
All the above shows a deep concern for contextualizing the work
in its own historical and cultural situation, rather than appropriating
it. Not only isJabra painfully aware of the task and responsibility
of the translator, he is also conscious of the relation of the text
to its cultural background; thus he includes the roots of the text as
manifested in its source as well as what he considers the essential
critical piece in English on it. While Mutran's translation can be
seen as an effort to graft an English text onto an Arabic stem,Jabra
attempts to transplant the text, making sure that it is accompanied
by some of its native soil. Jabra's philosophy of translation-as can
be deduced from his practice-is to let the Other keep his/her
identity, while Mutran is anxious to find or forge kin relations with
the Other and subsume him. Jabra's approach is dialogical
whereas Mutran's is immanent.
Jabra became enamored with Shakespeare when he was a teenager
in Palestine studying at the Arab College of Jerusalem and
reading Shakespeare in the original, as he documents in an essay
entitled "Shakespeare and I":
Even in those years I found what Arabic translations of Shakespeare were available
on the whole rather dull, inaccurate and often incomplete. They seemed
verballya wkwardb, ookish and strangelys tatic. Somewhere at the back of my mind
began the thought in those early years that one day I would try my hand at the
impossible task of making Arabic versions of Shakespeare which carried the same
verbal charge, the same evocative imagery and sustained metaphors, the same diversity
of rhythm, tone, eloquence, word-play, etc. (Celebration, 42)
Jabra indicated in an interview with me in Cairo that he treats
translations of Shakespeare as if they were "sacred texts," where no
license with the original can be tolerated. It is this concern and
respect for the original that caused Jabra to spend many years
working on each of his Shakespearean translations.2 Needless to
say, certain changes are inevitable in the process of literary translations,
especially in imagery. Jabra reflected on the organic images
and how to render the details in relation to the core as creatively
and as coherently as possible. When translating Othello, he
immersed himself not only in the world of Shakespeare, but also in
the poetry of al-Mutanabbi (d. 965) and Abu Tammam (d. 864),
two classical Arab poets known for the intricacy of their imagery.
Furthermore, he informed me, he read the translations aloud so
as to judge the oral impact of rhythm and cadence. He hesitated
on the translation of songs-whether to render them in meter and
with a rhyme scheme or to privilege meaning over form. He opted
for the latter, while striving to create a singsong effect through
alliteration and phonetic repetitions.
Jabra's concern for the original stems from his aversion to adulteration
and displacement. For him, translation is a mystery akin
to the sacred mysteries of transubstantiation (hilul) where one is
Other and Self simultaneously, when one has to be and not to be
at the same time. Jabra's sense of responsibility is not only to the
language of origin, but also to the target language. His concern
for the majestic equivalent of Shakespearean language in Arabic
never ceased to haunt him:
I kept looking at the lines of the Fool and of Edgar in his pretended madness and
wondered how they could be said in Arabic without losing their force. And yet I
was sure that the richness and nature of Arabic language, if I knew how to draw on
its expressive possibilities, would not let me down. For in order to translate effectively
it was not enough to know the original well: you had to know your own
language even better. (Celebration 143)
Jabra's translation strategy and commentaries assume a universal
literary power in Shakespeare that can be rendered in Arabic
only by tapping the universal potential of the Arabic language.
Translation, according to his understanding, works by connecting
the deep underlying universal resources and structures.
Jabra undertook translations while involved in other creative activities.
When translating Othello he was working on his novel, Al-
Bahth 'an Walid Mas'ud (The Search for Walid Mas'ud), 1978. Although
the novel about Palestinian resistance and the play about
tragic jealousy seem a world apart, one critic (Akram Maydani)
saw Othello as a subtext of the novel (Jabra, Celebration 146)-a
judgment that is difficult to go along with, though it fascinated
Jabra because it showed the complementarity and correspondence
of the different aspects of his cultural production.
When the Iraqi writer Najman Yasin asked Jabra about the diversity
of roles he had assumed, ranging from poet, critic, painter,
and translator to writer of novels and short stories, Jabra replied:
Even the translations I have done have been an extension of my literary interests.
And because I breathe through translation just as I breathe through my short stories
and novels, the books which I have translated are closely connected within my
own intellectual disposition. In the one activity I find help and support in interpreting
the other. ("Interpoetics" 208)
Jabra's respect for the integrity of the Other does not exclude a
measure of identification on the deep level between author and
translator. He sees in the Shakespearean tragic hero a "mask of the Self"
(Yanabi' 53) and a correspondence with his quest and bereavement:
Only as a writer intent on a creative task, impelled by love or the passion of a
humanist, or even the intensity of a man in agony, can one really get anywhere
near him [Shakespeare], round him. In the process one cannot help a secret em-
pathy taking place, a tacit identification, without which the resultant work would
most probablyb e deficient. (Celebration 148-49)
Jabra's sparkling translation approaches the original in force
and passion. It is moving, majestic, and accurate. He follows the
order of the verses on the page (unless it is prose), so the reader is
visually aware of the poetic arrangement of lines in the original.
He numbers the verses, making it easy to compare the Arabic with
the original. However, he does not try to fit the translation into a
given Arabic meter, which would have necessarily led to semantic
compromises to suit the prosodic form. Jabra also reproduces, as
best he can, the figures of thought in the original: parallelism, antitheses,
etc.
Although the translation is faithful to the original, the few
changes that are made are significant and clever. In the song of
lago about King Stephen (II. iii. 83-90), for example, there is a
mention of English money: a crown and sixpence. Jabra turns
them into dinar and dirham respectively-currency nomenclatures
common in the Arab world. Jabra systematically sticks to the original
key metaphors and complements his fidelity with discreet explicative
footnotes whenever necessary, clarifying the way the discourse
is dominated by metaphors from a given field-be it music
(III. i. 1-7), war (II. iii. 24), etc. When there are untranslatable
puns and verbal play, again Jabra points them out in footnotes; for
example, he explains the duplicity of meaning in tail/tale (III. i. 8-
9). Similarly Jabra elucidates-through notes-allusions that are
likely to be missed by Arab readers. He does, however, keep his
commentary to a minimum.
The poetic effect in Jabra's translation comes from the diction,
which is delicately and sensitively selected and combined to suggest
lyricism and dynamism. For example, Othello addresses
Emilia and asks her about the conduct of Desdemona with Cassio
(IV. ii. 6-10):
Othello: What, did they never whisper?
Emilia: Never, my lord
Othello: Nor send you out o'th'way?
Emilia: Never
Othello: To fetch her fan, her mask, her gloves, her nothing?
Emilia: Never my lord.
Now for the word "mask," the translator has a multiplicity of
choices in Arabic. It can be rendered as qina', hijab, burqu', and
khimar. Any of these four words could have worked. Qina' indicates
a cover for the face, with the same semantic and philological
tones as in English. Both mask and qina' connote today a disguising
facial cover, while earlier they indicated simply a face-cover
that could be used for disguise or protection. Hijab is currently
used to mean a (woman's) veil and so is burqu' (the latter is more
common in the Arab east). Both were dismissed by the translator
in favor of khimar, which signifies the same thing, but it has a more
poetic charge since it is associated with a famous verse by the
Umayyad poet Miskin al-Darimi (d. 708) in his portrayal of a
charming veiled woman who diverted a Believer from his worship:
Qul lil-malihatif i 1-khimar1i -aswadi
Madha ardti bi-nasikin muta'abidi
(Tell the beautiful woman with the black veil [khimar]
What have you done to a worshipping hermit!)
This verse became so notorious that it worked as publicity for the
sale of black veils (Ibn Khallikan 161). Jabra chose khimar, while
Mutran used hijab--semantically equivalent terms, but poetically
Jabra's is more effective.
IfJabra privileges textuality and Mutran tries to strike a balance
between fidelity to text and the demands of a live performance,
the Egyptian playwright Nu'man 'Ashur (1918-87) opts in his
translation of Othello (1984) to privilege performance. In his introduction,
he explains that he has translated the "dramatic
language" of Shakespeare, that is, his translation "transpose[s]
Shakespeare in a credible dramatic form to the audience" (90).
He sees his use of vernacular (colloquial Egyptian Arabic) not
as a mode of simplification or vulgarization, but as a mode of rendering
Shakespearean spirit in dramatic language (90).
'Ashur occasionally skips some lines or passages, but he generally
conforms to most of the dialogue and the act and scene
divisions of the original. Clearly he is interested in the play as
performed on the stage and the effect of articulations, attempting
at times idiomatic renderings that are quite effective in Arabic, as
for example lago's speech in the original "Though I do hate him,
as I do hell's pains" (I. i. 154), which comes out in Arabic literally
as "You know that I hate him blindly" (Ashur 93).


Adaptations

A number of dramatic and cinematic works in the Arab world
have been structured on the story of Othello, with enough variation
in the plot line to suggest a free adaptation. The analysis of
such works reveals the spectrum of ideological concerns and artistic
orientations in contemporary Arabic culture. These adaptations
have taken the form of folk theater and commercial cinema
in Egypt, carnivalistic theater in Morocco, and avant-garde drama
in Iraq.
A well-known Upper Egyptian adaptation of Othello took place in
the late 1960s and was a great success. It was revived in Spring 1991
in the Egyptian provinces. This adaptation by Mahmud Isma'ilJad
of Qina is entitled 'Atallah (one of the Arabized forms of Othello);
instead of using the original subtitle, "The Moor of Venice," it is
identified as "A Popular Epic"; Desdemona becomes Fatimah (a
popular name for women in Arab-Islamic culture; the equivalent
of Every Woman), lago becomes Dahi (literally "immolator"),
Cassio becomes Hasan (literally "beautiful/good"), cousin of
Fatimah, and Bianca becomes a gypsy named Ma'zuzah (literally
"dear woman"). It was first performed during a popular religious
festival (of 'Abd al-Rahim al-Maghribi of Qina) using the traditional
folk songs of Upper Egypt and religious chants in honor of
the Prophet. The play opens with a chorus of singers called
madahin (literally panegyrists).
The first Act takes place in a cafe where 'Atallah-a respectable
and generous outsider who ends up marrying Fatimah, daughter
of Shaykh Radwan-is being discussed, in a dramatic exposition of
the main characters. 'Atallah has lent money to Fatimah's family
to pay for her operation and to provide for other family needs,
without boasting about his deed. Fatimah is considerably younger
than 'Atallah, and is-in contrast to him-literate. When 'Atallah
asks for Fatimah's hand, her mother is reluctant and casts doubts
on the propriety of the marriage. She reminds her family that
Fatimah is supposed to marry her cousin Hasan-as traditional
Arabs prefer first cousin marriages and these are arranged for
them in childhood. In engineering his plot, Dahi plays on the fact
that both Fatimah and Hasan are literate and cousins intended for
each other.
The second Act opens with the wedding of Fatimah and
'Atallah. Dahi gets an acquaintance to pick a fight with Hasan,
which mars the happy occasion. When 'Atallah wants to know how
the unpleasant quarrel started and who is to blame, he asks Dahi,
who insinuates that the fight was triggered by Hasan's rejection of
the wedding. 'Atallah, who had asked Hasan to be the manager of
his mill, is miffed by his behavior and loses faith in him. Dahi then
advises Hasan to get Fatimah to intercede on his behalf. Hasan,
having done so, departs. At that very moment 'Atallah arrives, and
Dahi insinuates a suspicious departure. Fatimah's plea on Hasan's
behalf irritates 'Atallah even more.
When Fatimah accidentally drops the silk handkerchief given to
her by 'Atallah, Wadidah (literally "friendly woman") picks it up
and gives it to her husband Dahi. The handkerchief is then used as
a proof of betrayal as Dahi claims he saw Hasan with it.
In the third Act Hasan gives the handkerchief he finds in his
pocket to Ma'zuzah. When 'Atallah asks Fatimah for the handkerchief,
he discovers she does not have it, which confirms his suspicion.
Dahi conceals 'Atallah and talks to Hasan about Ma'zuzah
while 'Atallah assumes the conversation is about Fatimah.
'Atallah determines to kill Fatimah and goes to find her asleep.
The rest of the drama follows the plot line of Othello with appropriate
changes in dialogue to suit the change in cultural context.
When confronted by Wadidah, 'Atallah produces the handkerchief
as the ultimate proof of betrayal. Wadidah then explains,
and Dahi subsequently confesses. 'Atallah commits suicide but
leaves a repentant Dahi to suffer all his life for his crime.
The play triggered a great deal of discussion, mostly welcoming
it as an event. For instance, Ghadah Al-Samman, the Syrian novelist
and journalist, applauded the transformation of Othello into a
peasant art work, told by a hakawati (traditional story-teller), accompanied
by a rababah (traditional chord instrument) chorus,
and beautifully directed by Emile Jirjis. Sami Khashabah, an Egyptian
critic, felt that 'Atallah was outstandingly successful in its use
of a chorus. The director managed to make the chorus functional
as well as relevant to the cultural environment. The chorus commented
on, set forth and linked scenes.
Louis 'Awad, by contrast, criticized the play on the grounds that
it is not genuinely "rural," since it represents the conquering intrusion
of Cairene norms into the countryside. Furthermore, he
questioned the ability of folkloristic art to express the complexities
of modern man in developing countries ('Awad "Al-Arajuz").
Muhammad 'Udah, a prominent Egyptian journalist, was more
analytical in his article entitled "Shakespeare for the Masses." He
thought the adaptation and direction of 'Atallah, byJad and Jirjis"3
respectively, was exemplary. It offered a new approach to
Shakespeare that "kept his spirit, but recreated his text," making
the play an authentic model for Egyptianizing the world legacy.
'Udah condemns the habitual stereotyped presentation of the
countryside, the stock presentation of peasant and land-owner,
and the imposition of cosmopolitan themes and poor performances
on the rural community in the name of progressiveness,
and he advocates a true popular cultural expression-not mere
revolutionary slogans-of the kind that has been achieved in the
play.
Abdul Mun'im Salim, an Egyptian dramatist and short story
writer, pointed out how the racial issue in Othello has been
dropped in 'Atallah and replaced by emphasis on the generation
gap between the young Fatimah/Desdemona and 'Atallah/
Othello on one hand, and class difference of rich/poor on the
other hand. Salim ascribed the success of the play to the imaginative
transplanting of the drama-through the addition of local
color and the modification of the plot-to a new place and habitat.
In an article by an anonymous author in a drama review, the
play is seen as particularly successful since it deals with an Upper
Egyptian issue: revenge and excessive emotionalism that often
lead to crime. Thus the reviewer sees the relevance of the play and
criticizes the Cairene audience that snubbed the play for not
matching the original. The very fact that the audience in Qina responded
to the performance by warning the hero about the
villain's plot is seen as a sign of success. Another reviewer in a local
paper points out how the Qina Othello ends up by asking the audience
their views on what happened (Baqtar), thus adding a
Brechtian touch.
All in all, the adaptation integrates the work into its
performative context, rendering it organic while raising social issues.
It strives to produce a critical consciousness among the spectators
that would help them resolve some of the persistent ills of
their own society.
If this adaptation of Othello represents the rural, peasant, folkloristic
and socialist perspective, then the 1983 film adaptation of
Othello entitled Al-Ghirah al-qatilah (Murderous Jealousy), directed
by Egyptian director 'Atif Al-Tayib (1947-95), may be seen as the
ideological perspective of a national-bourgeois, urban, upwardly
mobile, capitalistic middle class projected onto Othello.
The plot of Othello is adapted in this film to comment on fidelity
and betrayal in the highly unstable social and economic order
caused by the introduction of privatization and the "open door"
policy that characterized Egypt in the 1970s. It presents the story
of Dina/Desdemona and 'Umar 'Atallah/Othello. The latter is a
proud engineer who is reluctant to marry his beloved Dina because
he cannot provide the bourgeois lifestyle that befits her.
When a promising possibility of a higher standard of living is on
the horizon, he marries her, but refuses to invest her money in his
enterprise. They go for a trip with his long-standing friend Sami/
Cassio, along with Mukhlus/Iago and his wife. Instead of a handkerchief,
a necklace becomes the token. Mukhlus/Iago convinces
'Umar/ Othello that it was given to Sami/Cassio. The movement
between Venice and Cyprus is replaced by movement between
Cairo and Alexandria. Dina goes back to bring her jewelry to help
her husband who is financially in need, but he is too proud to accept
the offer. Thus she entrusts the jewelry to Mukhlus/Iago.
Dina's innocent trip to Cairo to help her husband is misconstrued
by 'Umar/Othello as a weekend spent with his friend Sami/
Cassio. 'Umar/Othello goes to strangle Dina/Desdemona, while
Mukhlus/Iago takes the jewelry and tries to escape. In the meantime
Sami/Cassio arrives with the needed money. A dog prevents
Mukhlus/Iago from departing and his theft is uncovered. Everything
falls into place and Dina/Desdemona is saved; it is a melodrama
that ends well and that reverses the tragic principle.
Another adaptation of Othello that transforms the Shakespearean
plot is by the Moroccan 'Abd al-Karim Birshid. His dramatic adaptation
was performed by the Dramatic Avantgarde troupe of
Casablanca in 1975-76, directed by Ibrahim Wardah. The play is
entitled 'Utayl wal-khayl wal-barud (Othello, Horses and Gunpowder).
In the play black African masks and sub-Saharan music were
used. Besides 'Utayl/Othello and Maymunah/Desdemona, the
cast of characters includes Shahrayar, the Play Director, and Mr.
Ambiguity, among others.
The influence of Pirandello is seen in the dialogue: there is a
theater within a theater, and a reflection on acting while acting-a
sort of mise-en-abymeg, iving the text a self-reflexive mood, and reflecting
the poetics of both The Arabian Nights and the French
nouveau roman. The play evokes varied myths, such as those of Atlas,
Oedipus, and Jonah. In an intertextual play within the Play,
'Utayl/Othello, annoyed with Mr. Ambiguity, tries to strangle him
while the latter reminds him that he is not Maymunah-a common
Arabic name for a girl, which also echoes Desdemona (Birshid
13). The shifts of scenes represent the mental states of the Director.
in a way reminiscent of Fellini's Otto e mezzo ("81/ ").
In this play, the betrayal of Shahrayar-his wife's adultery with a
black slave-is evoked and compared to 'Utayl/Othello. But
Shahrayar here is not the all-powerful Oriental despot, but a
Third-World ruler who exploits his people in the service of external
powers. He is a Shahrayar seen through the prism of Frantz
Fanon, and especially his Peau noire, masques blancs (1952). And
here the Pirandellesque approach, the masks, the impersonations-
all begin to have a Fanonesque dimension. Shahrayar admits
that he is a pawn made to hate slaves though he is one himself
(Birshid 27). The criticism of Shahrayar is possible only through
the clown's jokes (Birshid 31-32), in themselves "plays" akin to the
Play in question. In this context acting, pretending, and alluding
become a reference to the inability to speak directly and thus an
invitation to the audience to reconsider and reflect on the farfetched,
hidden, and indirect message of the Play. Thus the Director
becomes the invisible hand that moves the actors/pawns. By
extension and implication the Director becomes an allegory of the
decision-maker behind the scenes, the imperial power. And here
again, there is an interplay between the technical and dramatic
sense of the term "scene" and its general and metaphoric sense.
Othello is presented in the adaptation as a Moroccan mercenary
(Birshid 37) who goes to Indochina to fight. His mother gives him
an amulet to protect him on his voyage. His father gives him
prayer beads and advises him to recite the Quran. Maymunah/
Desdemona gives him a strand of her hair, requesting fidelity. She
is "the spirit of my village," as 'Utayl/Othello says. Perhaps this
explains the need to kill Maymunah, so as to free himself from his
roots (Birshid 43).
The drama, as the Director (a character in the Play) says, has to
have a struggle, and the choice is between siding with the victims
or the executioner. 'Utayl is tempted by medals, toys and gunpowder,
and in a vision resembling one at the opening of the Play, he
is shown going to fight enemies-unknown to him-in Indochina.
In a different setting, 'Utayl accuses the Director of being lago
(scene v), and attempts to strangle him. The ship, a symbol of history,
sails on.
The drama is a one-act play in seven scenes, the last of which is
called "the game of illusion and reality," a rubric that carries with
it the very notion of theatricality. Birshid calls his theater
ihtifali (celebrationist), as if it were a carnival. He advocates
"celebrationist realism" and reproduces the role-playing of everyday
life on stage in order to bring home the reality of daily pretenses.
Putting on and taking off masks fills this function. The author
asserts that all his plays end without conclusion, i.e. are open
to the possible, so that the work will continue to be written, as it
were, in the mind of the spectator (Qissimi 489).
While Jad's Upper Egyptian folk adaptation tries to deal with
traditional issues (revenge, marriage with outsiders, and generation
gaps) by combining Shakespeare with folk drama, the cinematic
adaptation joins Shakespeare to economic wishful thinking,
and Birshid's adaptation marries Shakespeare to Fanonesque
perspectives and Pirandello's dramatics, the Iraqi poet and dramatist
Yusuf al-Sayigh, in his two-act play "Desdemona" (1989), combines
Shakespeare with a detective story plot and the Rashomon
effect.14 How the intrigue takes place, who the traitor is, and what
his motivation might be-all these issues are raised, but not resolved.
Philosophical indeterminacy is combined with the labyrinthine
detective plot.
The play was produced by three different Iraqi directors-the
most prominent being Ibrahim Jalal, who developed a theory of
performance combining Brecht's intellectual distancing with
Aristotle's emotional catharsis. The other two directors were Naji
'Abd Al-Amir and Salah Al-Qassab (Yahya, "Al-Tajrib" 144). It was
also reproduced for the radio in Egypt by Abu Bakr Khalid. The
variety of the productions attests not only to the continual interest
in the play of Othello, but also to the ambiguity inherent in this
Iraqi adaptation and the continuing possibilities for re-interpretation.
The "Rashomon Effect," an expression that derives from Kurosawa's film
Rashomon, refers to the effect of conflicting multiple points of view in narrating
the central crime, which cannot be synthesized to establish the truth (Heider 73-
81).
Since the plot of Othello is known and ever-present in the mind
of the spectators, al-Sayigh dispenses with exposition and prologue
and starts with the murder. The play is set in a contemporary
investigation setting with hidden tape-recorders that are replayed
and secret chambers in which the confessions and claims of others
can be heard. This reproduces the ambiance of a police-run state,
characteristic of many post-independent countries in the Third
World. Everyone seems to be implicated depending on whose account
one follows. Alternate and contradictory views of the murder
and its motivation are presented. On one hand, 'Utayl is portrayed
as impotent and Desdemona as a virgin; thus the killing is
motivated by frustration rather than jealousy. On the other hand,
'Utayl is also projected as sleeping with Emilia, who is infatuated
with him and hates the snobbish Desdemona. It is, therefore, an
issue of either subsexuality or supersexuality; what is at stake is
either an impotent Othello or a randy Othello. With frequent
flashbacks, we are made to waver between an lago who deceives an
Othello, and an Othello who deceives an lago by going to bed with
his wife Emilia. The motif of the handkerchief is present, but what
it demonstrates is controversial. Some characters maintain that it
was given by Othello to Emilia, and so when lago displays it to
prove Desdemona's betrayal, this could hardly have convinced
Othello. The murder was not, therefore, a product of Moorish
gullibility. While lago thinks that Desdemona is too good for
Othello, Cassio in this play thinks, in contrast, that unworthy
Desdemona is no match for Othello. Cassio's homoerotic attraction
to Othello, as suggested by the dialogue, drives him to convince
Othello of Desdemona's "infidelity." As it turns out,
Othello's attempt at strangling the still virgin Desdemona does
not kill her, but she commits suicide when she overhears the accusations
of Cassio.
The play circles around the impossibility of comprehending the
truth behind the intention of the (conjugal) crime on one hand,
and on the other it shows how every character is implicated in the
crime-each in his/her own way. No one is really innocent. Each
is jealous of the other and would like to harm him/her. The conclusion,
as put in the mouth of the investigator, is: "There is no
absolute traitor. The crime is a complete institution" (Al-Sayigh
27). Gender issues, sexual desires, and power perspectives intermingle
to show the complexity of human relations and envies, and
the difficulty of isolating facts and arriving at truth; eventually the
entire network is responsible, not only a given individual. The play
does not attempt to present a clear-cut solution to the riddle of the
murder, though it creates a dark mood piece, where the opposition
between innocence and guilt are blurred since everyone participates
in a murderous institution.


The Intertext

Othello figures in passing or as a structural base in some Arabic-language
literary works. It is present in the form of a reference to the
Shakespearean play, a discussion of it, or a comparison to it.
One of the most important novelists in the Arab world is the
Sudanese Tayeb Salih, best known for his seminal novel Mawsim alhijrah
ila al-shimal, 1966 (Season of Migration to the North, 1969). Too
complicated to summarize, the novel is essentially about a prodigal
Sudanese, a product of English colonialism, who excels in his
studies, seduces white women, kills his English wife in a moment
of erotic ecstasy, and after serving his prison term, goes back to a
Sudanese village. There he lives incognito until one day he disappears
in the Nile. The story is narrated by a younger-generation
Sudanese who has come back from his studies in England and
meets the protagonist Mustafa Sa'eed in the village. He gradually
begins to put together the different pieces of Sa'eed's life as he
hears them from different and conflicting sources. The translator,
DenysJohnson-Davies, says about the novel:
Season has been variously described as an "Arabian Nights" in reverse, or as a story
of a modern-day Othello who seeks to turn the political tables on the West by
bedding as many of its women as he can. (Johnson-Davies v)
There are two direct references to Othello in the novel. The
protagonist Sa'eed compares himself to Othello as he talks to
Isabella Seymour, an English woman whom he seduces. The
author also reproduces Desdemona's chain of emotions when
encountering Othello and links them to Seymour's psyche-a
chain that will be reproduced by other English women who fall in
love with Sa'eed:
There came a moment when I felt I had been transformed in her eyes into a naked,
primitive creature, a spear in one hand and arrows in the other, hunting
elephants and lions in the jungles. This was fine. Curiosity has changed to gaiety,
and gaiety to sympathy, and when I stir the still pool in the depths the sympathy
will be transformed into a desire upon whose taut strings I shall play as I wish.
"What race are you?" she asked me. "Are you African or Asian?" "I am like
Othello-Arab-African," I said to her. (Salih, Season 38)
Mustafa Sa'eed also relates:
The ships at first sailed down the Nile carrying guns not bread, and the railways
were originally set up to transport troops, the schools were started so as to teach us
how to say "Yes" in their language. They imported to us the germ of the greatest
European violence, as seen on the Somme and at Verdun, the like of which the
world has never previously known, the germ of a deadly disease that struck them
more than a thousand years ago. Yes, my dear Sirs, I came as an invader into your
very homes: a drop of the poison which you have injected into the veins of history.
"I am no Othello, Othello was a lie." (Salih, Season 95)
The implication of the above is that an outsider is not assimilated
to the civilization of conquering Europe, as Othello was, but
stands out as a poisonous thorn in its flesh.
Mustafa Sa'eed's English wife, Jean Morris, was also not
Desdemona; the handkerchief token was played in reverse:
I knew she was unfaithful to me; the whole house was impregnated with the
smell of infidelity. Once I found a man's handkerchief which wasn't mine. "It's
yours," she said when I asked her. "This handkerchief isn't mine," I told her. "Assuming
it's not your handkerchief," she said, "what are you going to do about it?"
On another occasion I found a cigarette case, then a pen. "You're being unfaithful
to me," I said to her. "Suppose I am being unfaithful to you," she said. "I swear I'll
kill you," I shouted at her. "You only say that," she said with a jeering smile.
"What's stopping you from killing me? What are you waiting for? Perhaps you're
waiting till you find a man lying on top of me, and even then I don't think you'd
do anything. You'd sit on the edge of the bed and cry." (Salih, Season 162)
Clearly the inversion of the type of hero (Othello) and his function
in Europe is followed by inversion in the rest of the motifs. An
anti-Othello in Salih's novel finds the handkerchief of his wife's
lover and is unable to rise to the occasion.
The comparatist Barbara Harlow sees Season as an ironic counterpart
to Othello:
Season is, generally, a novel, a form imported by the Arabs from the West during
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when Europe and the Middle East
confronted each other over issues of culture, colonialism and curiosity. But if Season
is, by Western literary critical definitions, a novel, it nonetheless participates
as well in what, in Arabic literary terms is called mu'aradah, literally opposition,
contradiction, but here a formula whereby one person will write a poem, and another
will retaliate by writing along the same lines, but reversing the meaning.
Tayeb Salih's use of the "novel" form might be taken as a practice of this sort. It is
a re-reading of Shakespeare's Othello, a restatement of the tragedy, a re-shaping of
the tragic figure of the Moor. (Harlow 75)
This desire to counter the Shakespearean image of Othello, and
by extension the Orientalist image of an Arab, takes in Season the
form of a revenge that is no longer conjugal jealousy but collective
rage. The crime is not undertaken as an emotionally miscalculated
passion, a flaw, as in the Elizabethan drama, but designed in a
cold-blooded and calculated way. Violence, duplicity, fragmentation,
and schizophrenia seem the inevitable results of North-South
encounters in colonial enterprises, as the novel suggests. The protagonist
Mustafa Sa'eed is Othello and lago simultaneously.
The Ugandan novelist and critic Peter Nazareth confirms this
when he points out the function of Othello in Season:
Mustafa's constant linking of himself to Othello reveals both his wish to understand
himself through art, and his inability to do so since his reference to Othello
comes out of his desire to exploit the white women for revenge. Othello too was an
Arab-African  ho lived in the alien white world, and this is why he could be manipulated
into believing Desdemona had betrayed him: but he killed her out of
love, not cultural or historical revenge. (Nazareth 131)
Another Arab critic, Afnan Al-Qasim, argues that Sa'eed rejects
the identification with Othello partly because he is unable, like
him, to kill himself after killing Desdemona/Jean. Thus, according
to the critic he does not fall into a classical Shakespearean type
of tragedy but into a classical melodramatic tragedy. Al-Qasim sees
the hero as reversing the tragic hamartia; instead of possessing a
human flaw, he becomes, in Season, a sort of superman who aspires
to a utopian society. Thus he is unable to represent the dialectical
struggle of reality (Al-Qasim 20-22).
In contrast, Muhiy al-Din Subhi sees in Season an exploration of
social relations. Both in Season and in Othello the tragic is seen to
be the outcome of a cultural encounter that embodies a misunderstanding.
Both heroes are unable to establish meaningful human
relationships with the Other, and fall easily into devastating
misunderstandings. According to him, Othello and Desdemona
represent the relations of an aging Islamic culture with the
childlike renascent Europe, while in Season Jean represents a
strong Europe, dictating the conditions of war and peace. In fact
the feeling of communication between the hero and heroine of
Season comes from their shared pleasure in a crime, as if the twain
can only meet at the brink of death. The critic sees the protagonist
as carrying the collective memory of the Arabs who have been constantly
threatened from the time of the Crusaders to that of Zionist
settlers, and passing through direct colonialism. Thus Sa'eed is
seen as a personification of that resentment (Subhi 39-65).
In lectures and interviews, Tayeb Salih has admitted not only to
the influence of Shakespeare, but also to a desire to match what
Shakespeare did, saying: "By creating a mythology, ultimately we
have to present something of our mind" (Hijab 66). He added that
he wanted to create a character who is all intellect, without heart,
as well as to represent the illusory relations between Arab-Islamic
culture and Western European culture, and that Sa'eed himself
returned to Sudan as a kind of colonialist (Muhammadiyyah 125-
26). Tayeb Salih explained the relationship between Othello and
his own protagonist (Mustafa Sa'eed), saying that the reception of
Othello in Venice was unconvincing, since Othello accepts his role
as an army general fighting on behalf of Europe. The drama of
Othello is presented as a sentimental one, though, Salih believes, it
should have been considerably more than that: a cultural drama.
Salih then removes the drama from its individual and romantic
perspective and situates it in a social and cultural context. For
Salih, Mustafa Sa'eed is a more genuine portrait of a "Moor" in
Europe. He murders Jean Morris, the anti-Desdemona figure in
the novel, because he refuses to play the role assigned to him by
European culture. In the trial, Salih explains, Sa'eed realizes that
he has failed as an actor because the role is not realistic. Sa'eed's
return to the Sudanese village represents his desire to give up acting
and go back to his roots. The tragic element according to Salih
is that having been accustomed to "acting," he was unable to shed
the masks and personae, and he was forced to act there too
(Muhammadiyyah 132-33). In fact what Salih is arguing, through
an elaborate narrative and intertextual structure, is what the
US American writer Thomas Wolfe said in far simpler terms: "You
can't go home again."
Salih wanted to revise Shakespeare and correct Othello's image
by presenting a more authentic representation of a "Moor" in
"Venice" seen through the prism of a colonized person whose
roots are ruptured. He can neither graft himself properly onto the
Other nor rejoin the source.
In her "novel of formation," Bildungsroman, entitled Lina:
Lawhatfatat dimashqiyyah, 1982 (Lina: A Portrait of a Damascene Girl,
1994) after the name of the Damascene heroine, the Syrian novelist
and poet Samar Attar (Al-'Attar)tries to link the story of
Othello to the collective poetic reservoir of the Arabs while leaning
on it as a metaphor of possessive love, jealousy, and erotic fantasy.
References to Othello abound in the novel, starting with the
young man with "jealous" eyes who is infatuated with Lina, and
threatens to "strangle her" and strangle himself if he finds her
with another man, and who gives her "a bad translation of Othello"
(Attar 163). Later on, the heroine describes her anxiety as she is
getting ready to participate in a school performance of Othello (Attar
174-78). Lina, who is playing Desdemona, thinks of herjealous
beau-likely to be among the front-row spectators-as she approaches
the stage. Her interior monologue revolves, then,
around the love-hate relationship between them, and she sees herself
as nothing more than a "white ewe" tupped by a "black ram"
(Othello, I. i. 89 and 88 respectively). Othello's description of
Desdemona as a "strumpet" (V. ii. 78, 80) is recalled as well as
Iago's.
Mixing animal and human elements, and recalling erotic images,
Lina incarnates Desdemona, while imagining her young boyfriend
in the black figure. The last scene of the school play, as
Attar narrates in her novel, is so convincing that a voice in the
audience cries: "Don't strangle her!" (like the audience in Qina in
Upper Egypt when Jad's adaptation was presented), and applause
is mixed with girlish whimpering. When Lina's young man expresses
his love in possessive terms, she recalls Othello's words
before murdering Desdemona (Attar 192). The rumors of Lina's
rebellion and the feminist dimension of the novel overlap and
crystallize. In an associative chain, Lina recalls literary scenes of
love: from The Arabian Nights, from courtly and Udhri love (unconsummated
love typically associated with the Arabian Udhra tribe
in early Islam), etc. only to conclude to herself, half sarcastically,
that lovers have not been strangling their beloved ones only because
the opportunity was not present (Attar 194). In the protagonist's
revolt against patriarchy, she thinks of other cases where men
abused women. She toys with the idea of Shakespeare's possible
exposure to the life story of the Syrian medieval poet Dik Al-Jinn
of Homs-whose biographers expounded on his murdering his
beloved and innocent wife accused falsely of adultery and his
belated recognition-and muses that this rather than Cinthio
might be Shakespeare's source. Eventually, she falls back, not on
the possible historical link between the two dramas, but on cultural
dispositions and ethnic similarities. Lina concludes that the
poet of Homs and the Moor of Venice both belong to her race and
culture: they both exhibitjealousy and male possessiveness.
The Egyptian writer Salwa Bakr's short story entitled "The Sorrows
ows of Desdemona," which appeared in her translated collection
The Wiles of Men and Other Stories (1992), revolves around a young
girl who is rehearsing the role of Desdemona for a high school
performance of Othello. The director of the school play is the
teacher Mrs. Inayat, who is highly admired by Muna, the student
protagonist. The story opens as follows:
Mrs. Inayat came up to her and touched her head with the palms of her hands,
causing her to bend forward, and said in her English that seemed as though it had
been running in her blood for generations, "No, not like that, Muna. Desdemona
couldn't be like that in this situation. Be more frightened, more submissive and
miserable, with your head like this-bend forward." (Bakr 27)
The interior monologue of the student actress reveals her feminist
inclinations and impatience with male authoritarianism. She
is contrasted with her teacher, Mrs. Inayat, whose mother followed
her father "like a dog following its master" (Bakr 28). At one point
in the rehearsal the teacher tells her students:
"That was what Desdemona's feelings were-a mixture of fear, pain, and contempt.
She was suffering just like a sparrow that is incapable of battling against the
wind. Do you understand? Listen: human beings can express such pain in many
ways. Now close your eyes and for three minutes think about Desdemona's sorrows
and how you'd express such pain. Come on, let's begin." (Bakr 30-31)
In Muna's stream of consciousness, focusing on how her family
would treat her with mistrust and victimize her as a girl, she somehow
manages to reproduce the sorrows of a Desdemona:
Muna too closed her eyes and thought about Desdemona's sorrows, saying to herself
that her young brother would open the door and scream "Muna's come!" He
would point to his throat with a quick gesture as though someone were cutting the
throat of a chicken and would stick his tongue out gloatingly. As soon as the door
closed her mother would be in the hallway, meeting her with abuse...
The point that Salwa Bakr is trying to make, without ever stating it,
is akin to the one made by Jorge Luis Borges in his short story "La
Busca de Averroes" (Averroes' Search): in order to enact an emotion
you have to find its correlative within you. Muna's victimization
corresponds to Desdemona's.
In these two narratives by two Arab feminists, the identification
is not with an "Arab" Othello, but with the victim Desdemona.
Here, as well as in the two works to be discussed next, the author's
imagination is captured more by the issue of the innocent victim
than by national identity. It is not ethnicity that matters but oppression,
and therefore there seems to be a shift from a nationalist
to a moral perspective.
Othello is also incorporated in Al-Waqai' al-gharibah fi hayat Sa'id
Abu Al-Nahs al-mutasha'il, 1974 (The Secret Life of Saeed, The Ill-fated
Pessoptimist, 1982) by the Palestinian Emile Habiby (1920-96),
which was originally published in Haifa in 1974. It has been described
by Edward Said as "a carnivalesque explosion of parody
and theatrical farce," and it has been called "an Arab Tristram
Shandy" (as quoted in the blurb for the 1989 edition). The novel is
about a Palestinian picaro living in Israel, who eventually is transformed
from a servile character into a combative one. The thirtyseventh
chapter of the novel is entitled "How Saeed Finds Himself
in the Midst of an Arabian-Shakespearean Poetry Circle." What is
humorous in the title is the contrast between the length and style
of the heading, made in the traditional manner of Classical Arabic
books on one hand, and the content-Shakespeare's poetry-on
the other. Furthermore, the hyphenated epithet, "Arabian-
Shakespearean," is pregnant with the tension caused by joining
two separate and distant poetics. The scene is an Israeli jail where
the warden is conversing on Shakespeare with the Palestinian prisoner
Saeed. The latter, trying to accommodate and please, is most
willing to take the part of Desdemona-implying a willingness to
play victim.
Then he [the warden] stood up and began acting the role of Othello giving
Desdemona the fatal kiss. I stretched out on the ground like her, but he said, "Get
up! It's not time for that yet!" (Habiby, Secret 129)
Later on, the guard asks the ill-fated prisoner what he talked
about with the warden, and Saeed says: "Oh, about Shakespeare
and Othello and Desdemona. .. I quote from the first and lie
down like the third" (Habiby, Secret 129). The jailers give him a
terrible beating, insult him, and call him "our very own
Shakespeare." While he was hoping to show off his culture to his
masters and impress them, he is met with ridicule as if he were
Candide.
The Moroccan critic Sa'id 'Allush points out that Habiby makes
use of established models of heroism drawn from literature. Such
ready-made heroisms are poked fun at, creating a tragi-comic
work ('Allush 64). The protagonist's use of Shakespeare inverts
the tragic pathos into farce.
When I conducted an informal interview with Habiby in Cairo,
he would not give me a reason for having chosen to refer to Othello
specifically in his allusion to Shakespeare, but he informed me
that he was dazzled by Paul Robeson playing Othello, and specifically
cally by his articulation of the lines: "I kiss'd thee ere I kill'd thee,
no way but this,/Killing myself, to die upon a kiss" (V. ii. 359-60).
When Saeed, the servile protagonist-anxious to please his oppressors,
the Israeli jailers-plays Desdemona and lies down, helpless
and victimized in front of the warden playing Othello, the
scene does not evoke pity but ridicule. Here, the feminization and
victimization of the Palestinian in Israel are both asserted and
later rejected. By the end of the novel the docility of the protagonist
Saeed is changed into resistance. The function of laughter is
to break the crippling effect of fear and intimidation. Palestine
and the Palestinian resistance are therefore the crux of the novel,
and the invocation of Othello is a motif that simply foregrounds
the issue.
Palestine and the Palestinian cause are also the core of another
play called Litamut Desdemona (Let Desdemona Die), 1970, by the
Lebanese playwright Raymond G6bara, first performed in the
Baalbek International Art Festival in the Fall of 1970. The play is
supertitled: "A Dramatic Nightmare." It was written against the
background of the Palestinian tragedy of 1948, the Arab defeat of
1967, and the then recent death of President Nasser of Egypt and
the fratricide known as "Black September." The cast of characters
includes seven males and one female-all nameless. The play presents
a web of Pirandellesque horrors, requiring one of the characters
to play the victim. Text, slides, music, and multivisual techniques
were used in the performance and are indicated in the
stage directions. There are no references to Othello in the text of
the play aside from the presence of Desdemona in the title.
Clearly, Desdemona intersects with the content of the play in the
theme of innocent victim. The play itself does not evoke the political,
except indirectly, and at a second remove in the order of
hermeneutic interpretation. The spectator is confronted with a
Christlike allegory projected in an avant-garde dramatic mode.
From this postmodern "passion play," replete with religious suggestiveness,
the spectator is expected to make the link with victimized
Palestine, a country that has not only been usurped by an enemy,
but also renounced by its sister Arab countries. A critic and a
prominent political scientist, Ghassan Salam, who studied the
Lebanese theatrical movement wrote:
It is interesting to note in relation to [Gébara's] Desdemona how a play that has
no reference whatsoever to public life can give rise to a political interpretation.
On the surface of it, Desdemonias the story of a group of actors who are unable to
perform their play unless one of them agrees to play the victim. The man without
a number, the weakest of all, the last comer, is thus dragged, semiconscious, to be
crucified. He is a naive person caught by his own goodness; he is the person who
must die so that others may live...
The political interpretation cannot take place except a posteriori, and that is
what makes it dicey... Isn't Gébara wrong in leaving the field open to surmises by
not citing at all Palestine which, as he maintains, is the principal theme of his
work? (Salam 100-01)
Other works may be cited that have used Shakespearean texts to
establish correspondences with the situations of the collective Self
in the Arab World.
Although Othello is mentioned in Shakespeare malikan, the play
does not dwell on Othello. It essentially articulates the wavering of
the artist between authentic art and commercialized art in terms
of Hamlet's self-interrogation: "To be, or not to be: that is the
question," i.e., to be or not to be an Artist.
Another play that uses the Othello motif is Al-Muharrij (The
Jester), 1973, by the Syrian poet and dramatist Muhammad
Maghut. The play denounces the ills of Arab society and its political
order through satire. In this three-act play, the first act is
devoted to a troupe of failed players enacting Othello in a poor
suburban slum. Their performance is introduced as
"committed art," and the audience criticizes it on various grounds,
including the adulteration of the purity of Arabic. What the actors
perform in this play within a play is 
a comic version of Othello in the exaggerated melodramatic tradition of Yusuf
Wahbi, the famous Egyptian stage and film actor, while the female dancer plays
Desdemona, appearing in modern costume, swinging her handbag, and chewing
gum. (Badawi, "Introduction" 15)
This parallels Othello in the Land of Wonders, a play written by the late Iranian
writer Gholamhossein Saedi in the mid 1980s, raising issues of women's rights,
censorship, and religious government when staging Othello in the Islamic Republic

of Iran (Safa 131-63
What transpires from the Arabization of Othello are the various
concerns of Arab thought and culture as they evolved from the
early to the late twentieth century. The trajectory of Othello in the
land of the Arabs shows the waverings between fascination by, and
anxiety about, the Other. Further, it demonstrates a will to challenge
and revise what is conceived as a distorted image. One can
also detect in the use of the English play a ploy to foreground issues
that deal specifically with the Self.
In a seminal article on influence, by the late Egyptian critic
Abdul-Muhsin Taha Badr, it was argued-using the example of the
impact of Charles Baudelaire on 'Abd al-Rahman Shukri-that the
"influence" of the French poet on the Egyptian poet comes from
the correspondence of Baudelairean imagery to Arab folk images,
abundantly present in popular strata but unarticulated in the high
tradition and the Arabic canon. Badr convincingly argues that the
images gathered by Shukri from Les Fleurs du mal activate latent
and repressed imagery in the receiver (Badr 52-69). An investigation
of Othello's Arabization makes it possible to generalize Badr's
thesis, demonstrating not so much that Shakespeare, the Other,
can be grasped only through looking inside the Self, or that
Shakespeare functions as a foreign literary curiosity, as that
Shakespeare offers both a revealing mirror to the Self and a view
into Elizabethan English literature. In that sense, Shakespeare's
Othello in the Arab world functions like the windowpane in
Mallarme's poem "Les Fénêtres" - both transparent and reflective,
allowing a view of the external while simultaneously reflecting
the internal scene.