Naima Akef: "I Am Difficult, Cunning, and Yet Kind"

The article translated below comes from Al Kawakeb (الكواكب), issue 27, April 1951 — Rajab 1370 in the Islamic calendar — an 84-page issue that sold for 5 piastres. The cover carries a portrait of the American actress Ann Baxter, described as a star of Twentieth Century Fox, and promises a gift inside: a colour picture of Linda Darnell. That was Al Kawakeb in the early 1950s — Hollywood on the cover, Cairo on the inside pages, and no sense at all that the two belonged to separate worlds.

Inside this issue, Naima Akef writes about herself. Not a journalist writing about her, not a studio profile — her own voice, arranged under three headings she chose: I am difficult. I am cunning. I am kind. And then she proceeds to prove all three with stories that are, by turns, alarming, very funny, and quietly revealing about what it took to hold a place on a Cairo stage in those years.

What I love about this piece is how little she performs modesty. Golden Era press rarely allowed dancers to be complicated in public; they were adored or condemned, sweetheart or scandal. Here is Naima Akef claiming difficulty and cunning as her own, in print, in a mainstream magazine, and daring the reader to like her anyway.

This translation was made by Abdulaziz Al Sharani, and I am deeply grateful to him for it. Translating Golden Era Egyptian magazine writing is not a matter of swapping words — the humour, the rhythm, the sly asides all have to survive the crossing, and here they do. Without translators like Abdulaziz, material like this stays locked inside the collection, visible but unreadable to most of the people who would love it most. Shukran, Abdulaziz.

I wanted the article to look the way it looked in 1951, so I worked from the original layout — the headline, the portrait, the column structure,— and kept it as close to the original as I could, setting the English translation inside that design. Below it you'll find the original Arabic pages as well, so you can read it either way: the translation, or the article exactly as a reader in Cairo would have opened it in April 1951.

The magazine is part of the Raqs Sharqi Museum collection and you can support my work by becoming a patron of the museum here. THANK YOU! Yours Lenka Badriyah