Land in Revolt: Ecocriticism and the Roots of Resistance

Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 11 (2018) 248–273 MEJCC brill.com/mjcc Land in Revolt Eco-criticism and the Roots of Resistance Rachel Webb Jekanowski Concordia University [email protected] Abstract In this article, I examine the politicization of natural resources like water and land, and the wider entanglement of environments and politics, in Egyptian cinematic imaginaries. I focus on Youssef Chahine’s film al-Ard (The land, 1969) and its politicization of agricultural land during the presidency of Gamal Abdel Nasser (1954–1970) and the British colonial occupation of Egypt (1882–1956). Because histories of colonialism and nationalism in the Arab world are rooted in the economic and political exploitation of material resources (including land, water, and people), I draw on eco-criticism as a method of critical reading to analyze the film’s depictions of these configurations of political power and resource management. I argue that al-Ard roots its depiction of the resistance of the Egyptian peasantry (fellahin) in environmental terms, namely, restrictions to resource access and the affective relationships of the peasants to the land. By tracing these imbrications, I seek to relocate environmental concerns in scholarship on political resistance with reference to Nasser-era cinema. Keywords al-Ard – Egyptian cinema – eco-criticism – peasantry – postcolonialism – resistance – Youssef Chahine 1 Introduction Natural resources like land and water have often been politicized in cinematic imaginaries and national cultures, including in Egypt. During the presidency of Gamal Abdel Nasser (1956–1970), for instance, land reforms and agricultural policies, along with increased state intervention in the Egyptian economy and © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/18739865-01103003 land in revolt 249 domestic film industry, constituted a crucial part of the government’s anticolonial and socialist ideology.1 Nasser’s implementation of land reform laws in the 1950s and 1960s challenged British colonial policies of land ownership.2 The revolutionary government’s efforts to redistribute agricultural lands aimed to recognize claims by the Egyptian peasantry, or fellahin, to their farmlands, so as to boost agricultural productivity and redress the disenfranchisement of rural inhabitants. The film al-Ard (The land, 1969), directed by Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Chahine, explicitly addresses the politicization of agricultural land during the British colonial occupation (1882–1956) and Nasser’s presidency. In both title and narrative, al-Ard portrays the profound association between the landscape of rural Egypt and peasant resistance to colonial oppression.3 The film therefore offers a useful entry point to a discussion of the interconnectedness of environmental and land-based concerns, peasant resistance and anti-colonial politics in Nasser-era cinematic imaginaries. In this article, I argue that the politicization of natural resources like land and water in al-Ard is significant because the film frames the associations between society, economics and the natural world in overt terms of anticolonial politics and it politicizes the fellahin and natural resources. In making this argument, I aim to relocate environmental concerns in scholarship on Egyptian cinematic depictions of resistance. 1 Studio Misr, founded by Talʿat Harb in 1935, was the first domestic film studio in Egypt and on the African continent. The studio was nationalized in 1960 as an asset of Bank Misr, Egypt’s largest bank. Other Egyptian-owned film companies were nationalized by 1963, but the industry remained only partially nationalized as private studios co-existed with the public sector (Gordon 2006: 78). This situation enabled some Egyptian filmmakers like Chahine to work both within and outside the public sector. 2 Following the Free Officers Movement in 1952, the Egyptian government passed the first land reform program. This program limited individual land ownership by nationalizing large properties and redistributing farmland to tenants, landless villagers and estate workers. Successive land reform laws in 1961 and 1969 similarly aimed to reduce the maximum size of individual estates. In total, the state redistributed approximately one-seventh of Egypt’s arable land from large upper-class landowners. While not uniformly successful, these policies aimed to redistribute land to reduce rural poverty, dismantle pre-revolutionary and colonial class structures and erode the political and economic power of the pasha class. Ray Bush argues that Nasser’s land reforms are only one example of the historical politicization of land in Egypt, and practices of land accumulation through dispossession in the Middle East (Bush 2011: 392–393). For a study of the links between agrarian reform, land politics and peasant resistance, see Bush (2011). 3 The film al-Ard is an adaptation of ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Sharqawi’s popular socialist realist Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 11 (2018) 248–273 250 jekanowski Produced a decade after Nasser’s agrarian land reforms and the nationalization of the Egyptian cotton industry, al-Ard offers a narrative of political resistance rooted in the politicization of the fellahin, land and rural life. The film’s narrative is set in the 1930s under British military occupation, when the estate system of cotton agriculture was a cash crop. Both the sociopolitical context of the 1960s and historical conditions of colonialism drive the film’s narrative focus on political resistance and the economic exploitation of the countryside. Al-Ard depicts a village of peasant farmers in rural Egypt who struggle to eke out a living cultivating cotton, while facing disenfranchisement by Mahmud Bey, the wealthy pasha landowner, and local officials. Muhammad Abu Swailam, the film’s protagonist, lives in the village with his daughter Wasifa. He, like ‘Abd al-Hadi (the romantic lead who woes Wasifa), Diab, and many of the other men in their community are wage-laborers who grow cotton for export. Most of the residents live precariously from harvest to harvest, depending on the mayor’s meager allotment of irrigation days to water their crops. In contrast, Muhammad Effendi, the village schoolteacher, religious leader Shaykh Hassouna, and shopkeeper Shaykh Yusuf are less economically vulnerable because of their education, ties to the city and trade. In al-Ard, environmental conditions dominate the economic, political and social relations of the villagers. The community inhabits a particularly rich stretch of countryside in rural Egypt, the agricultural center of the country nourished by the Nile River waters. The countryside, which has been cultivated into miles of cotton fields, visually dominates the opening scene of the film. As the camera tracks along the landscape, the only infrastructure that interrupts the miles of cotton plants are dirt lanes lined with palm trees, irrigation canals and a shed. The organic cycle of the cotton plant—from its growth, maturity and harvest—serves to demarcate the narrative’s passage of time. Yet the ecological abundance of such scenes is undercut by the pasha’s restrictions on the fellahin’s access to water to irrigate their crops. Images of the villagers’ threadbare homes, landless men loitering by the road without work and a starving woman (Khadra) offering herself as a prostitute for food reiterate the peasants’ impoverishment at the hands of the colonial-backed landowners. Faced with water shortages and the appropriation of their land to construct a road to the pasha’s palace, the villagers stage a series of increasingly defiant actions against the pasha’s onerous decrees. The fellahin’s political consciousness culminates in their attempt to harvest Abu Swailam’s cotton before his fields are confis- novel of the same name, published in 1953. For a comparative analysis of the two works, see Downs (1995). Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 11 (2018) 248–273 land in revolt 251 cated. This act of violence against the peasants is recoded as an act of collective resistance against the colonial authorities and an expression of Egyptian independence. Following the narrative emphasis on anti-colonial resistance, resources, environment and class, I draw on eco-criticism as a method of textual analysis to attend to the entanglements of politics and the physical world. Eco-criticism, which emerges from the multidisciplinary field of environmental humanities, addresses imbrications of the physical world—including manufactured and natural environments—and cultural practices, like cinema and literature. By reading al-Ard eco-critically—that is, with attention to environmental, agricultural and land-based concerns in the film and the context of its production— I aim to move beyond auteurist and national critical paradigms dominating English-language scholarship on the Egyptian cinema. I seek to add nuance to prior readings of al-Ard as a national allegory of anti-colonial struggle by attending to the profound agricultural and territorial concerns that mark this depiction of the fellahin. In the rest of this article, I contend that the cultivated agrarian landscape imprints and shapes the fellahin’s resistance as a catalyst for political action, and grounds the peasants’ participation in anti-colonial politics. I analyze three politicized subjects—agrarian land, irrigation water and the fellahin—each of which are bound up in the film’s narrative of anti-colonial resistance. By taking up these subjects, I demonstrate how the management of natural resources and political resistance are intertwined with the naturalization of the peasantry as political participants. My analysis of these imbrications offers lessons for other Egyptian films about rural life and the peasantry, from the pre-revolutionary period to the present. Because histories of colonialism, nationalism and globalization across the Arab world are fundamentally linked to the exploitation of material resources (including land, water and people), an eco-critical inquiry of films produced in this region can help to visualize how these configurations of power and industry are expressed in Arab and Egyptian cultural imaginaries. 2 Eco-criticism, Postcolonialism, and Critical Approaches to Arab Cinema Historians, geographers and cultural scholars have traced the importance of land and resource management during the Ottoman, French and British occupations of Egypt (Mitchell 1991; Burke 2009). Similarly, scholars have reiterated the significance of land reforms and large-scale resource management projects like the Aswan High Dam to Nasser’s socialist and anti-colonial vision (Ibrahim Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 11 (2018) 248–273 252 jekanowski and Ibrahim 2003; Gordon 2006). Despite this, little work has been done in film studies to examine cinematic representations of these entanglements of colonialism, nationalism and Egyptian environments. This is an important oversight, in light of considerations given to the fellahin in Egyptian cinema from the pre-revolutionary period through Nasser’s presidency. Many celebrated films like al-Warda al-baydaʾ (The white rose, Muhammad Karim, 1933), al-Ard al-tayyiba (The good earth, Mahmud Zulficar, 1954), and Duʿaʾ al-karawan (The call of the curlew or The nightingale’s prayer, Henri Barakat, 1959) include rural settings and protagonists from peasant backgrounds. Several of Chahine’s earlier films also address disenfranchised or rural Egyptians, often by blending socialist realism and melodrama with Third World politics. Siraʿ fi-l-wadi (Struggle in the valley or The blazing sun, 1954), for instance, depicts the social and economic tensions around agrarian reforms. The protagonist Ahmad is an engineer who returns to his father’s sugarcane farm, and uses his education to introduce new irrigation technologies to improve the harvest yields. Siraʿ fi-l-wadi hinges on the popular convention of the cross-class romance between Ahmad and the daughter of a local pasha, a trope that acquired new political resonance during Nasser’s presidency, challenging the economic and class structures in an independent, anti-colonial Egypt (Gordon 2002: 101). Al-Nas wa-l-Nil (The people and the Nile, 1968)—commissioned by the Egyptian and Soviet governments to commemorate the construction of the Aswan High Dam and Third World solidarity (Khouri 2010: 67–68)—addresses the social, political and environmental ramifications of this state-sponsored hydroelectric project in Upper Egypt. These films, like al-Ard, chart various articulations of anti-colonial and nationalist politics in Egypt through depictions of lower-class Egyptians, especially those disenfranchised by colonial land policies. Eco-criticism, as a method of close reading, enables us to attend to these cinematic representations of the peasantry, and the political significance of land and water in Egypt’s colonial and national history. Yet much of the Englishlanguage scholarship on Egyptian film, and Arab cinema more broadly, has adopted one of two critical approaches: auteur theory or the paradigm of national cinema. Youssef Chahine’s work in particular has fallen within these modes of inquiry, given his status as one of Egypt’s most celebrated directors (Gordon 2012: 217). Chahine’s prolific career (around forty-two films over the course of sixty years), and the continued commercial availability of some films to non-Arabic-speaking audiences, contributed to his status as a widely recognizable filmmaker. However, both of these critical approaches overlook the persistent interweaving of the environment and politics, which is central to the narrative of peasant resistance in al-Ard. Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 11 (2018) 248–273 land in revolt 253 Auteur analysis has proven to be an attractive approach by which to theorize Chahine’s work, perhaps because of his experimentation with an array of generic styles and the circulation of his films in global festival networks.4 Studies such as Youssef Chahine (Fawal 2001), Postcolonial African Cinema: Ten Directors (Murphy and Williams 2007), and Ten Arab Filmmakers (Gugler 2015) attribute Chahine’s ‘idiosyncratic’ approach to his status as a singular creative force, and emphasize his international financial and artistic connections. Despite Chahine’s public engagement over the course of his career with pressing social issues in the Arab world, including class solidarities, anti-colonialist politics and pan-Arabism, English-language critics frequently downplay these concerns in favor of such auteur-oriented accounts. Barrie Wharton, for instance, contends that this ‘contemporary academic obsession with Chahine as an anti-establishment maverick director whose themes of cosmopolitanism, liberalism and homosexuality mark him out as an anti-regime figure in Arab society,’ serves to minimize Nasserist themes of ‘solidarity in community’ in light of continuing western anxieties surrounding Cold War politics (Wharton 2009: 33). Viola Shafik similarly remarks on his ubiquitous presence in the Egyptian film industry and scholarship on Golden Age cinema, referring to Chahine as ‘an auteur in the deepest Truffaut sense’ (Shafik 2015: 99). Auteur analysis has several significant shortcomings, however, including an emphasis on a director’s individual creative vision that downplays the collaborative nature of most commercial filmmaking. This attention to the individual and comparative analysis between a filmmaker’s works can also simplify complex interrelationships between the material realities of a film’s production and greater social, political and economic currents. This can include the resources, labor and environment of a film’s production, as well as the historical conditions of empire. The other prevailing critical framework in scholarship on Chahine’s work and Arab cinema is the sociopolitical reading of film as national allegory. Walter Armbrust notes that nationalism ‘is one of the über-themes of Egyptian political cinema’ (Armbrust 2011: 228). Analyzing Chahine’s films as allegories for the Egyptian national project is, on the one hand, a fruitful and necessary step to understanding how his work speaks to larger sociopolitical discourses in Egypt, particularly during the period of Nasser’s rule. Ibrahim Fawal and Malek Khouri, for instance, position al-Ard as an allegory of Egyptians’ attachment to the land (Fawal 2001: 73), and the struggle to assert Egypt’s territorial boundaries after its 1967 military defeat by Israel (Khouri 2010: 79). Khouri is 4 For instance, al-Ard premiered in 1970 at the Festival de Cannes in France. Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 11 (2018) 248–273 254 jekanowski particularly invested in reorienting Chahine’s oeuvre in relation to the Arab national project that defined Egypt and its film industry throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Likewise, David Murphy and Patrick Williams propose that the work of Chahine is ‘inescapably tied up with the simultaneous production or reproduction of the nation’ and the ‘postcolonial project’ (Murphy and Williams 2007: 15). Frequently characterizing Chahine as an auteur, Joel Gordon examines Bab al-hadid (Cairo station, 1958) and Hiyya fawda (Chaos, 2007) as ‘masterpiece’ texts through which we can examine the role of the artist in communicating regional, national and Third World themes (Gordon 2012: 218; Gordon 2016). Reading cultural productions from the Global South as nationalist allegories can risk burdening texts with essentialist readings and constitutive hierarchies (Shih 2004). However, the theme of national resistance has a strong resonance for Egyptian scholars writing about Egyptian cinema (Dickinson 2007). In her article on Layla (directed by Wedad ʿOrfi and Istifan Rusti, 1927), the first feature film produced in Egypt, Kay Dickinson observes that the nation remains the primary lens through which Egyptian critics have examined Layla and later Nasser-era films (Dickinson 2007: 140). Since ‘the nation has remained largely unchallenged as the principal discursive object’ in Egyptian historical scholarship, the struggle for national independence has dominated much of the country’s film history (Gorman 2003: 3). Eco-criticism can transcend some of the limitations of auteur film analysis, and expand from the national allegory model, by developing a broader concept of the political that considers imbrications of the natural world, economic and political systems, and cultural production. Eco-critical inquiry, Ursula Heise observes, has become convenient shorthand for a vein of cultural studies that aims to address physical and natural environments in relation to cultural practices (Heise 2006: 506). Given the broad definition of this field, scholars have turned to a broad array of methodologies to analyze cinematic and literary texts, and other media. These approaches include environmentally-oriented textual and sociocultural readings of films (Cubitt 2005; Rust, Monani and Cubitt 2013; Pick and Narraway 2013), eco-philosophy (Bennett 2010; Ivakhiv 2013), and studies of media industries’ resource politics and hydrocarbon footprints (Bozak 2012; Maxwell and Miller 2012; Walker and Starosielski 2016). Despite differences in methodologies and theoretical frameworks, many ecocritical critiques share an interest in placing postcolonial, transnational and environmentalist perspectives in dialog. Anat Pick and Guinevere Narraway perhaps best summarize the aims of eco-critical inquiry, by proposing that it traces ‘how political, ethical and formal discourses come to bear on cinema’s relation to nonhuman nature and nonhuman beings’ (Pick and Narraway 2013: Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 11 (2018) 248–273 land in revolt 255 5–6). As such, eco-criticism can orient film scholarship toward more nuanced engagements with resource politics and diverse environments, in the real world and in cinematic imaginaries. Despite this attention to the connections between politics, the economy and the physical world, literary eco-criticism and eco-media scholarship unfortunately remain dominated by western-centric theories of media and environment. Anglo-American scholars also frequently demonstrate a predilection for case studies from the Global North. By integrating postcolonial theory into ecocritical inquiry, Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin—following the foundational work of Rob Nixon (2005) and Elizabeth DeLoughrey and Cara Cilano (2007)— argue for ‘the need to bring postcolonial and ecological issues together as a means of challenging continuing imperialist modes of social and environmental dominance’ (Huggan and Tiffin 2010: 2). Postcolonial eco-criticism can also be used to examine how national interests and transnational capitalism exploit environments, and ‘ecological’ rhetoric, for power and commercial profit (Huggan and Tiffin 2010: 2). In bringing postcolonialism and eco-criticism together, Huggan and Tiffin recognize that the differences in the fields’ ‘most basic interpretative methods of fundamental ideological concerns’ can however produce tensions around race, class, power and privilege (Huggan and Tiffin 2010: 2). In film and literary studies, some scholars seek to examine non-western concepts of ecology and environmental filmmaking in the Asia-Pacific region, Latin America and Africa (Vital 2008; Lu and Mi 2009; Kääpä and Gustafsson 2013; Slovic, Rangarajan and Sarveswaran 2015). Given the western-centric intellectual genealogy of most eco-criticism, consideration of the neglected ‘imbrications of the social and the ecological’ in texts from the Global South requires ‘new practices of reading both the texts themselves and the place of humans in nature’ (Slovic, Rangarajan and Sarveswaran 2015: 1, 3). Anthony Vital argues for an even more regionally specific vein of ‘African eco-criticism’, to take up local and national histories of colonialism, modernity and cultural understandings of the natural world in African literature. Such an African ecocriticism would ‘differentiate itself from ecocriticism in the North, which has … not felt compelled to engage with the consequences of European colonialism’ (Vital 2008: 88). In the analysis of al-Ard that follows, I take up Vital’s call to expand eco-criticism as a field of inquiry to examine non-western cultural productions and postcolonial histories. In other words, by turning to eco-criticism, I engage with the film’s representations of the precarious nature of human and nonhuman life and their interpolation in political resistance in the context of Nasser-era resource management. Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 11 (2018) 248–273 256 3 jekanowski Politicization of Land and Agriculture Eco-criticism offers fertile ground for charting how landscapes bear the physical inscriptions of human and nonhuman stories, including those of political resistance. Serenella Iovino positions the landscape as a text, which emerges from accumulated inscriptions of human and nonhuman ‘actions, discourses, imagination and physical forces’ (Iovino 2016: 3). This sedimentation of stories on the landscape can be excavated by eco-critical analysis, akin to reading a book or film text. Reading cinematic landscapes, such as those in al-Ard, offers a tool for restoring a voice to silenced populations. These include the ‘impersonal stories’ of nonhumans or relational processes, and experiences of marginalized human populations (Iovino 2016: 6). Drawing on Iovino’s appraisal of real and imagined Italian landscapes, the cinematic landscapes of al-Ard can be read as politicized texts that bear the inscriptions of ‘embodied narratives of social and power relations’ (Iovino 2016: 3) under colonialism and Nasser’s presidency. Examining the traces of colonial and national policies toward land ownership, resource management and cotton agriculture in the agrarian landscapes illustrates the politicization of land. This politicization, in turn, spurs the fellahin’s resistance in the film. Throughout al-Ard, the cultivated fields of cotton dominate the mise en scène. This agrarian landscape subtly shifts over the growing season in the film, as the cotton plants grow from seedlings to mature plants, topped with white bolls of fiber. The fields themselves are laid out geometrically in large squares, with the crops lined up in long parallel rows. Order is imposed on the rural landscape in the organization of the fields, even as other forms of life flourish along the dirt roads or at the edges of the fields. In numerous shots, for instance, palm trees grace the horizon, framing the agricultural fields. The changes to the landscape over the growing season and the effects of the pasha’s artificial drought on the crops are also visualized through color. The verdant fields in the opening sequence transform to a dusty auburn, as the crops grow parched. When the peasants finally open the irrigation channels that snake through the fields, the water’s reflection of the sky’s turquoise hue seems to affirm its vital power. The visual prominence of the landscape, for which al-Ard is named, positions land as a secondary, nonhuman protagonist. Reading the landscape’s shifting colors, the maturity of the crops, and the dehydration of the soil offers a second narrative of transformation in al-Ard. This narrative of the agrarian landscape, physically shaped by the histories of colonialism and the struggle for Egypt’s independence, is intertwined with that of the fellahin. Despite these entangled histories and the landscape’s politicization, the film’s narrative of resistance remains focused on the fellahin, rather than the land. Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 11 (2018) 248–273 land in revolt figure 1 257 One of many scenes of the agrarian landscape, at once natural and shaped by human industry Screen shot from al-Ard In al-Ard, the agrarian landscape is at once natural and highly manufactured. The land, teeming with nonhuman ecologies and life processes that evolved over millennia, is part of the nonhuman realm we call ‘nature’. Yet the earth’s physical contours and conditions of life have become equally determined by human culture, politics and economic systems since the Anthropocene (White and Wilbert 2009: 1). This ‘production of nature’ through human society in Egypt is reflected on the constitution of the cinematic landscapes in al-Ard. Human infrastructure and industry physically reshaped the rural landscape, transforming it from ‘nature’ to a cultivated ecology of industrial agriculture (fig. 1). The grid of irrigation channels, the arrangement of the cotton fields and the village of mud brick houses transform the countryside into a space of industry, albeit one dominated by organic life rather than machines. Reading these agrarian landscapes therefore requires attention to the representation of land in Egyptian imaginaries, as well as to the physical and cultural inscriptions of real world historical forces onto rural Egypt. These inscriptions are imported into the cinematic landscapes through the film’s production. Although al-Ard is a work of fiction, it was shot on location in the Egyptian Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 11 (2018) 248–273 258 jekanowski countryside. The film’s landscapes therefore document real palm trees, soil, cotton and nonhuman ecologies that existed in the world at the moment of filming. Each frame that depicts the agrarian landscape therefore archives a slice of life in late 1960s rural Egypt, which the film then repurposes to imagine 1930s Egypt under British colonial occupation. The terrain of the cinematic landscape therefore takes up the accumulated history of cotton as a cash crop and its physical remaking of rural Egypt to create the conditions for the fellahin’s political struggle and resistance. The landscapes in al-Ard are inscribed by two systems of power: colonialism and Egyptian nationalism under Nasser. They come together historically through land ownership, resource management and industrial cotton agriculture. As a cash crop, single-species cotton agriculture (or ‘monoculture’) flourished in Egypt from the nineteenth century, due to the fertile Nile floodplains and strategic political and economic policies. During Ottoman rule in the early nineteenth century, Muhammad ʿAli converted Egyptian agriculture to cultivate cotton as an export commodity, positioning the crop as part of the Ottomans’ economic and industrial modernization of Egypt (Burke 2009: 100). As an agricultural system, cotton therefore directly reshaped the rural environment and water circulation for political and economic ends. Cotton agriculture also radically impacted the lives of the fellahin who labored in the fields and altered the practices of landownership. Under the Ottoman and British occupations, irrigation networks were standardized and expanded to maximize cotton production, thereby increasing ‘the area devoted to cotton production’ and annual outputs (Burke 2009: 101). The regimentation of rural Egypt through the management of land and water, through production quotas and proscribed agricultural practices, had severe social consequences, particularly for rural Egyptians. Limits were placed on villagers’ movement outside their districts as the fellahin were increasingly tied geographically and economically to cotton agriculture (Mitchell 1991). The consolidation of private land ownership under wealthy landowners also resulted in increasing numbers of landless peasants, and the emergence of a new landowning class (Burke 2009). These socioeconomic conditions in rural Egypt directly shaped the conditions that sparked the 1952 Free Officers coup, and assisted Nasser’s rise to power (Burke 2009). Under colonialism, Egypt was remade from a diverse agricultural producer to ‘a country whose economy was dominated by the production of a single commodity, raw cotton, for the global textile industry of Europe’ (Mitchell 1991: 16). After the Egyptian revolution, cotton and the countryside therefore became a politicized staging ground for Nasser’s nationalist and Third World ideologies. The disenfranchisement of the fellahin and the consolidation of land owner- Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 11 (2018) 248–273 land in revolt 259 ship shaped Nasser’s priorities to modernize Egypt through the redistribution of property and modern infrastructure projects in the countryside.5 Cotton agriculture not only physically shaped the Egyptian landscape, which the cinematic landscapes of al-Ard document, but the industry also reaffirmed the political significance of land to ideologies of nation. Nasser developed this connection between land, the Egyptian nation and natural resources in a national charter, drafted in 1962. In it, Nasser cited the land as the material, economic and ideological basis for the revolutionary struggle, consequently politicizing the expansion of agriculture through ‘processes of land reclamation’, increased ‘productivity of cultivated land’, and the ‘industrialisation of the countryside’ (Nasser 1972: 116–117). Nasser’s policies of land reform to ‘rebuild’ the Egyptian nation by boosting agricultural productivity and recognizing peasants’ claims to their farmland reaffirmed the economic and political significance of the agrarian landscape. The agrarian landscapes in al-Ard testify to the ways in which colonial and national structures of control over agricultural production historically overlapped, translating the oppressive real-life socioeconomic conditions facing the fellahin onto the screen. The politicization of the rural landscape and cotton agriculture in the film world visualizes the ways in which humans ‘produce nature’ or cultivate their environments. In other words, the history of the colonial remaking of rural Egypt through cotton agriculture and Nasser-era land reforms is textually reaffirmed through these linkages between nature and colonial-natural resource politics. Although the politicization of the film’s landscapes creates the conditions for the fellahin’s resistance, and becomes a space for enacting this political struggle, the land does not exert its own political agency. The landscape’s ecologies offer vibrant ‘impersonal stories’ following Iovino, but the resistance to which they attest remains the province of human actors. Instead, the inscriptions of colonial and national power through the land are used in al-Ard to mobilize the fellahin’s resistance. 5 For a sense of how unequal the distribution of land was during this period, consider that in the late 1940s, on the eve of the Free Officers coup, around sixty percent of Egypt’s rural population—approximately 1.6 million families—was landless. In contrast, only a tiny percentage of the total population—around 12,000 families—owned thirty-five percent of the country’s arable land (Gordon 2006: 21). Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 11 (2018) 248–273 260 4 jekanowski Water Management and Mobilizing Resistance Like the politicization of land and cotton, water is a primary political catalyst for the peasants’ struggle in al-Ard. The strict management of water through the regulation of irrigation days per growing season spurs the peasants’ uprising against the pasha, and by extension the feudal system and colonial resource management. This theme of water as politics has been well established in Egypt’s environmental and political histories as well. As part of Nasser’s vision for Egypt, he refers to the waters of the Nile River as a force of ‘creative life’, a resource to be harnessed for the country’s future agricultural and economic development (Nasser 1972: 116). Likewise, the Nile’s dominant position in Egypt’s ecosystems gives its waters the ‘political potential to materialize national and societal visions’ (World of Matter 2013).6 The maintenance of political power, and creation of economic wealth, is therefore highly dependent on the control of water (World of Matter 2013). Al-Ard makes a strong case for this link between politics and water management in its depiction of the peasants’ quixotic struggle, or what Ursula Biemann describes as water’s role as ‘a vehicle for epic narratives’ in Egypt (World of Matter 2013). Access to water to supply the village’s cotton crops underpins the rise and fall of the peasants’ political mobilization. This includes the seeds of political consciousness and organization around the restriction of irrigation water, as well as their attempt to defy Mahmud Bey’s confiscation of their farmlands. Restrictions on irrigation water also functions as a mechanism of colonial power, which the Bey uses to control the movement and economic productivity of the fellahin. At the beginning of the film, the mayor announces that he has been instructed to limit the peasants to five irrigation days for the entire growing season, down from the already restrictive ten days. Controlling the fellahin’s access to water reaffirms their precarious economic position and lack of legal protection (as any cotton worker found operating the water wheel or otherwise siphoning off water faces arrest). By depicting the water restrictions as the catalyst for the fellahin’s tenuous unification for political action, al-Ard makes the argument that peasant resistance is as much predicated on resource scarcity as it is on abstract concepts like liberty or justice. 6 For a contemporary perspective on the legacy of Nasser’s land reforms and subsequent government policies on agriculture and land policies, see Ursula Biemann’s documentary ‘Egyptian Chemistry: Land Reforms’, in the online multimedia project World of Matter, launched in 2013: http://www.worldofmatter.net/fertilizing‑natural‑social‑sphere#path= fertilizing‑natural‑social‑sphere. Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 11 (2018) 248–273 land in revolt 261 The difference between ten and five days of water becomes the breaking point between the survival and death of the season’s cotton crop. From this moment of crisis two courses of action emerge: accepting the looming economic disaster, or imagining a method of resistance. Although it is Abu Swailam who vocalizes the second, revolutionary option to the other farmers, al-Ard depicts the peasants’ unification to resist the new water measures as a communal, rather than individual, action. Like the bundle of firewood (more resilient together than as individual pieces) Abu Swailam grasps to represent the community, it is the nonhuman world (water, wood, land) that offers metaphors for the villagers’ oppression and resistance. The seeds of struggle are nurtured here not by the rich silt and waters of the Nile, but by a communal passion stoked by the authority’s withholding of water. Two pivotal moments in the film solidify this connection between water and the political mobilization of the peasant community. In the first, the men from the village hold a clandestine assembly to discuss the increasingly dire issue of water restrictions. The evening gathering takes place within a villager’s home, the domestic space echoing the social intimacy of this moment. Abu Swailam, Muhammad Effendi, and the rest of the men sit clustered together, on the floor and on stools, framed by the house’s mud walls. As the men discuss their predicament, Abu Swailam speaks eloquently of the land dying. Organized resistance to the pasha’s irrigation order is the only way to protect their crops and way of life, he asserts. In addition to his call to contravene the irrigation measures, Muhammad Effendi suggests writing a petition to appeal to Mahmud Bey. The mise en scène of the petition’s drafting establishes the importance of this moment (fig. 2). Muhammad Effendi sits at the center of the frame, with Abu Swailam and ʿAbd al-Hadi located to his right in a place of prominence. The rest of the participants are seated around the schoolteacher.7 Their faces are basked in light, with the corners of the room in shadow, bestowing an air of solemnity on the proceedings. The sounds of crick- 7 Although a feminist analysis of al-Ard exceeds the scope of this article, scenes such as this one reiterate the peripheral role women play in both village politics and governance. In this scene, only one elderly woman is present. Although her face is visible, she is partially obscured by the darkened edge of the film frame. This composition visualizes women’s political and social marginalization in the rest of the film. Abu Swailam’s daughter Wasifa, for instance, is scolded for eavesdropping on political discussions, which Abu Swailam refers to as ‘men’s talk’. Khadra, an impoverished orphan, resorts to exchanging sex for food, and is later murdered. Gender, as well as land ownership, therefore marks the limitations of the fellahin’s political community. Despite the village’s mobilization against the pasha, the community remains rife with internal economic and gender inequalities. Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 11 (2018) 248–273 262 figure 2 jekanowski Muhammad Effendi (center left) writes the petition, surrounded by Abu Swailam and the other men from the village Screen shot from al-Ard ets, other animal life, and traditional stringed instruments also cultivate an impression of authenticity derived from the soundscape of rural locations and peasant culture. Khouri describes how scenes like this one, which engage with the issue of class exploitation and stress the political necessity of Egyptians’ unity, illustrate ‘the multilateral intersections … between the struggles against feudalism, British colonialism, and local governments that rely on this class-colonial hierarchical structure’ (Khouri 2010: 77). Yet the ecological also persistently reasserts itself as an aspect of this ‘feudal-colonial-class’ entanglement. The soundscape and the mise en scène formally reiterate the village’s interconnectedness with its rural surroundings. Their assembly also offers extra-textual parallels to other Third World and peasant-led political movements based on access to resources in the postwar era, particularly in relation to water.8 8 Comparative historical examples include anti-colonial agrarian movements in India, and struggles for indigenous rights and environmental justice in parts of Latin America. For a comparative perspective on indigenous and subaltern responses to imperial exploitation of environments, see Beinart and Hughes (2007). Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 11 (2018) 248–273 land in revolt figure 3 263 Irrigating the cotton fields Screen shot from al-Ard Here, the fellahin are invested in protecting their crops, to which their lives are bound. In other words, cross-species survival dependent on access to water—rather than individual resource ownership or commercial profit— is the driving motivation for their political mobilization. The fellahin’s anticolonial resistance is therefore entangled with imperial and feudal restrictions on water, and reflects broader intersections of empire, resource management and class. In a subsequent scene, as the villagers wait for news from Cairo about their petition, the absence of water again acts as a spark for communal action. Faced with a deteriorating crop, one man, Diab, desperately attacks an irrigation channel to divert water into his fields. This crucial moment reveals the political community’s fragility; yet infighting between villagers among their dry fields pivots quickly from violence to resolution when a cow falls into the water wheel. Like the water restrictions, the cow becomes a nonhuman catalyst for the peasants’ collaboration and reaffirmation of political solidarity as the men work together to rescue it. In the dénouement to this scene, on receiving word that Muhammad Effendi is returning to the village, Abdel-Hadi calls the men to open the irrigation channels and let the water flow, in opposition Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 11 (2018) 248–273 264 jekanowski to the mayor’s directive (fig. 3). As the men race to their fields to channel the water, extra-diegetic music rises, the lyrics of which proclaim that the thirsty land will be irrigated with the men’s blood. The extreme close-up shots of the water flowing through the dusty fields, and between cotton plants, presents water as the primal force of biological life. At the same time, the currents foreshadow the workers’ blood, which will be split in the fields in the film’s conclusion. Through the narrative of the failed peasant uprising against the exploitative policies of the local pasha and puppet government in Cairo, the fellahin are depicted as stand-ins for an anti-colonial or even proto-nationalist revolution in the countryside. Yet the film’s political investment in the Egyptian peasantry reveals a profound ambivalence toward the role of the fellahin in modern Egypt and anti-colonial politics. Although resources like land and water act as stimuli for the peasant revolt, they are not given political agency in their own right as nonhuman ‘vibrant matter’ (Bennett 2010). Rather, the fellahin’s political resistance is ‘rooted’ in their affective and traditional relationships to the agrarian landscape and the cotton that grows upon it. Therefore, al-Ard offers an imaginary of Egypt, as per Benedict Anderson’s use of the national imaginary, which is highly dependent on the fellahin as a ‘naturalized’ component of the rural landscape. In the last section of this article, I unpack how this ‘naturalization’ of the fellahin undercuts their political agency by presenting their political mobilization as an offshoot of their connection to the earth. 5 The Fellahin, Nature and Authenticity During the 1950s and 1960s, numerous Egyptian films turned toward ‘a strong folklorization of peasantry’, mixing socialist realism with melodrama to underscore Egypt’s emerging status as an anti-colonial nation (Shafik 2007: 264). These films, including al-Ard, frequently presented themes of sociopolitical conflict and poverty in contemporary rural Egypt, but projected these issues onto historical narratives. Such a temporal displacement of Nasser-era sociopolitical and economic issues onto a ‘folkloric’ or historical past served to engage with these concerns, but through the veil of allegory. In al-Ard, the peasantry performs this allegorical function through the historical narrative of the film. Samia Kholoussi, analyzing Egyptian discourses about rural inhabitants between 1919 and 1952, argues that peasants were cast as ‘both a microcosm of the nation and the principal component of its cultural heritage’ (Kholoussi 2005: 277). Egyptian historian Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot, who Kholoussi references to support this claim, writes that ‘the fallah and Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 11 (2018) 248–273 land in revolt 265 his society’ represent the ‘essence’ of Egyptian culture; to understand Egypt, one must examine the fellahin’s ‘values and beliefs in the political pattern of the land’ (Kholoussi 2005: 278). According to Kholoussi, Egyptian concepts of national identity are rooted in ideas of the agrarian landscape and the people who inhabit it (Kholoussi 2005: 278). Wharton offers a related reading of alArd, proposing that Chahine represents the fellahin as ‘the cornerstone of the nation’ (Wharton 2009: 44). The film’s socialist realist aesthetics and narrative emphasis on the peasants’ ‘real daily life’ and ‘quasi religious attachment to their plot of land,’ associates the fellahin, land and Egypt through a discourse of authenticity (Wharton 2009: 43–45). This constitution of the peasantry as an authentic reflection of Egypt has political ramifications. The narrative arch serves to politicize the fellahin, and associate their struggle for water and land with anti-colonial revolution. At the same time, al-Ard affiliates the folkloric peasantry with the agrarian landscape in which they live. Several scenes adopt a somewhat ethnographic interest in the fellahin; for example, in one scene, a young girl in a traditional fallah dress dances amidst other village children. These details, like the film’s shooting on location in the countryside, are designed to bestow a sense of authenticity to these images of rural life, to undergird the story of political struggle.9 Significantly, the fellahin’s authenticity as a national allegory or folkloric embodiment of Egypt stems from their physical proximity and affective connection to the land.10 By working and living in the Egyptian countryside, the village’s politics are intimately entangled in their access to water, the cultivation of their crops and communal survival. The film al-Ard consistently reaffirms—through their physical and affective bonds to the agrarian environment—their authenticity as agents of Egypt’s anti-colonial struggle. The final scene of al-Ard of the villagers joyously harvesting cotton as a last stand against the approaching road construction establishes the fellahin’s authenticity as political participants. Following the occupation of the village by colonial soldiers on camels, the community almost unravels. Shaykh Yusuf and Shaykh Hassouna, despite the latter’s attempts to convince the pasha to reroute the road, choose to profit from the infrastructure project rather than stand in solidarity with the rest of the village. Similarly, some impoverished peasants 9 10 Chahine takes a similar approach in Siraʾ fi-l-wadi, which he filmed on site in the countryside with attention to ethnographic details in his depictions of rural life in Egypt (Gordon 2002: 109). In the 1960s, for instance, twenty-five percent of the Egyptian labor force worked in cotton agriculture, and another twenty-five percent of the nation’s industrial workers manufactured cotton textiles (Ibrahim and Ibrahim 2003: 125–126). Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 11 (2018) 248–273 266 figure 4 jekanowski The villagers’ blood is spilled amongst the cotton Screen shot from al-Ard take jobs working on the road after their own lands are seized: the pressure to feed their families momentarily supersedes political solidarity. Yet the pasha’s removal of the colonial soldiers (who were disenfranchised peasants from Upper Egypt and pressed in military service) for fraternizing with the villagers offers a temporary moment of unity. In the interval between the short-lived military occupation and the arrival of the police, the villagers and road laborers rush to the fields to harvest the ripe cotton bolls. Momentarily unified in this moment of resistance, men and women, farmers and landless peasants, joyously work side-by-side picking cotton. The scene ends abruptly when mounted police interrupt the harvest, brutally attacking the villagers and spraying blood onto the cotton bolls (fig. 4). The scene’s violence leaves the peasants bloodied and fields trampled, but does not belie the film’s revolutionary politics. Rather, the fellahin’s resistance (through their agricultural labor) connects their political engagement to their status as peasant farmers, and to the land itself. This stands in sharp contrast men like Hassouna, who do not physically till the earth and are thus aligned with the city, modernization and the exploitation of the fellahin. Furthermore, the solidarity built between the villagers, the colonial soldiers, and the peasants building the road reaffirms the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 11 (2018) 248–273 land in revolt figure 5 267 Abu Swailam caresses one of the young cotton plants in the film’s opening scene Screen shot from al-Ard link between class struggle and access to land and water. The violent suppression of the fellahin’s harvest bolsters their political struggle, as they face death to protect their fields. The final images of the film depict Abu Swailam grasping at cotton stems and then the dusty soil, as a soldier drags him to his death. This graphically echoes the opening sequence, in which Abu Swailam is shown caressing a young cotton plant early in the growing season (fig. 5). Repeated close-ups of the peasants’ hands touching plants, grasping at the dry soil and rustling straw affirm a tangible, affective relationship between the earth, the peasantry and nonhuman life. In one shot, the skin of Abu Swailam’s hands takes on a green hue from handling the plants, as if he himself is transforming into the vegetation. This motif of the fellahin as indigenous inhabitants of the countryside’s ecology (manufactured as it is) runs throughout al-Ard. Shots repeatedly framing Abu Swailam, Abdel-Hadi, and other laborers in the fields and among the plants similarly visualize their profound relationships to the natural world. While Abu Swailam’s relationship with the land is depicted as deeply affective and relational, rather than economic, rooting the fellahin’s resistance in the threatened landscape offers an ambivalent portrait of their political agency. Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 11 (2018) 248–273 268 jekanowski As examined above, the fellahin’s socioeconomic oppression is linked to the exploitation of the agrarian environment, through water restrictions and land appropriation for modernization projects. This entanglement of human and nonhuman life, made precarious by colonialism and feudalism, enables viewers to imagine radical political solidarity between species. Yet al-Ard remains ambivalent about this possibility, since the fellahin’s struggles are reduced to their affective connection to the environment. As a socially and economically marginalized group, they are in effect defined in terms of the environment they inhabit, which Huggan and Tiffin term ‘environmental racism’ (Huggan and Tiffin 2010: 4). Although this trope affirms the fellahin’s connections to the agrarian environment, it also reduces the complexity of the village’s internal divisions, and the history of European colonialism and resource extraction expressed through monoculture cotton cultivation in Egypt, to a simplistic equation between the oppression of the earth and oppression of the fellahin. Although the peasants’ affective bond with land and cotton motivates them to mobilize against the pasha’s exploitative policies, the repeated visual association of the fellahin with vegetative life defines this group through the environmental changes they face. Although some critics position this alliance between the peasantry and nature as a means of empowering ‘the hitherto silent peasantry’ on screen (Wharton 2009: 45), this form of ecological imperialism reduces the fellahin’s political agency by positioning their resistance as a ‘natural’ extension of their relationships to the nonhuman world. This trope of environmental racism parallels colonial ideologies that link western discourses of racial superiority with cultural representations of the natural world. Such ‘tropes of empire’ in film and literature helped justify the exploitation of colonized peoples by rendering them less than fully human by comparing them to animals, plants or commodity staples (Shohat and Stam 2013: 137–138). The identification of the fellahin with their cotton crop in al-Ard echoes such tropes of empire, once again with ambiguous implications for the film’s anti-colonial politics. Typically, ‘naturalizing’ colonized groups by associating them ‘with the vegetative and the instinctual rather than with the learned and the cultural’ is used to position ‘the colonized world … as raw material’ for empire (Shohat and Stam 2013: 137–138). Here, however, the fellahin are naturalized as inhabitants of the film’s agricultural world; this aligns them with nonhuman life rather than with the project of modernity and civilization. The film al-Ard thus seeks to deploy the visual identification between the peasantry and vegetative life for revolutionary ends, positioning the fellahin as naturalized torchbearers of Egyptian anti-colonialism. The latent ecological imperialism at play in al-Ard orients the peasantry as authentic representations of Egypt and revolutionary politics. It does so by Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 11 (2018) 248–273 land in revolt 269 rooting their individual and collective identity in their affinity with the agrarian environment. Political resistance, like cotton, is cultivated in the expansive fields of rural Egypt. The nation, although an imported colonial concept, becomes naturalized as inherently Egyptian, with its roots imbedded in the fellahin as well as the soil. The film’s ambivalence around the fellahin’s identification with the land visualizes the deep entanglement of politics and the environment that runs through Egyptian cinematic imaginaries as well as wider colonial and Nasser-era history. 6 Conclusion Prior scholarship on al-Ard (Youssef Chahine 1969) and Nasser-era cinema has documented the politicization of landscapes and class in Egyptian imaginaries, typically in relation to national struggle. In this article I have expanded on readings of al-Ard by attending to the importance of the agrarian environment and natural resources in the fellahin’s struggle. My intervention relies on ecocritical inquiry to expose imbrications of politics and environment through the film’s depiction of its titular resource (land), water and the fellahin. Each in turn is politicized as a site or agent of anti-colonial resistance, with the fellahin’s affective relationships to the landscape both supporting and rooting their political mobilization. While these bonds between the peasantry and agrarian environment naturalize the fellahin as representatives of postcolonial Egypt, this tactic also threatens to foreclose a more radical political solidarity between human and nonhuman life. These entanglements between the Egyptian landscape, fellahin and revolutionary politics are not limited to the Nasser period, as an overview of contemporary Egyptian film and media suggests. One area of future eco-critical inquiry includes films depicting the impacts of the January 25 Revolution in 2011 (popularly known as the Arab Spring uprisings) on Egypt’s water management and land policies. The French documentary Je suis le peuple (I am the people, directed by Anna Roussillon, 2014) about a village’s experiences of the revolution in rural Egypt and Jasmina Metwaly and Philip Rizk’s short video Land Without (2012) offer productive sites for eco-critical analyses of contemporary landscapes in revolutionary contexts. Given the profound historical interconnections between environments, economics and politics in the postcolonial Arab world, eco-criticism is a necessary tool for film and cultural scholars to examine how anti-colonial resistance engages with resources and environments on screen. Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 11 (2018) 248–273 270 jekanowski References Anderson, Benedict (1996). 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Directed by Henri Barakat. Distributed by Arab Film Distribution. DVD. Egyptian Chemistry: Land Reforms (2013). Directed by Ursula Biemann. World of Matter. Accessed 10 September 2018: https://www.worldofmatter.net/fertilizing‑natural ‑social‑sphere. Hiyya fawda (Chaos) (2007). Directed by Youssef Chahine. Distributed by Misr International Films. DVD. Je suis le peuple (I am the people) (2014). Directed by Anna Roussillon. Produced by Hautlesmains Productions, Narratio Films, and Docks 66. Land Without (2012). Directed by Jasmina Metwaly and Philip Rizk. Accessed 10 September 2018: https://vimeo.com/18833388. Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 11 (2018) 248–273 land in revolt 273 Layla (1927). Directed by Wedad ‘Orfi and Istifan Rusti. al-Nas wa-l-Nil (The people and the Nile) (1968). Directed by Youssef Chahine. Siraʿ fi-l-wadi (Struggle in the valley or The blazing sun) (1954). Directed by Youssef Chahine. al-Warda al-bayda’ (The white rose) (1933). Directed by Muhammad Karim. Distributed by Atlantic Outlet Sales. DVD. Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 11 (2018) 248–273