Identity, Land and Revolt in Egyptian Earth: An Ecofeminist Reading

Abstract

Abstract This article rethinks the representation of Egyptian rural culture and peasant participation in the nationalist struggle against British colonialism in Abdel Rahman al-Sharqaawi’s well-known novel Egyptian Earth, Al-Ard (1954). It specifically examines the concepts of identity, land, and revolt in Egyptian Earth from an ecofeminist perspective, relating peasants’ resistance against corrupt feudal-imperialist injustices in early twentieth-century Egypt to the dominant patriarchal cultural attitudes towards women’s and nature’s positions in the pre- and post-1952 revolutionary Egypt. It argues that although al-Sharqaawi’s Egyptian Earth gives marginalized Egyptian peasants the opportunity to participate in an important transitional period in the history of modern Egypt, it discusses the invisible psycho-cultural, environmental and social reasons and circumstances that hinder democratic transition in post-1952 revolution, with a particular focus on Egyptian countryside. Within this context, Egyptian villagers in Egyptian Earth are not just colonized people fighting colonial violence and discriminations through reconnecting to their land. They also stand for a patriarchal place and land suffering complicated, deep-seated problems of cultural isolation, sexism, and tribalism. In this way, Egyptian Earth develops ecofeminist ethics that condemn the colonial rule and the nationalist discourse, as both maintain hierarchical relationships between the urban and the rural, the male and the female, culture and nature, and authority and common people.