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Broken Window

Some time before the revolution of 2011, the playwright had already envisioned the kind of revolt that was about to explode, and -with it- the necessity for an artistic expression that would bridge the gap between the unspoken oppression and the manipulated platforms of public opinion. In that context, she created “Made in Egypt”, a story about an Egyptian Bo-Azizy, a man who -instead of setting his body on fire like in Tunisia- kills his own family with a poisonous meal. Not far from reality, the story had many connections with several incidents of Egyptian fathers killing their own children out of mercy, and sometimes killing themselves afterwards. The facts of poverty and de-humanisation were beyond imagination.
Here the father eventually fails inches crime. The poison had no effect. Like many products carrying the mark of “made in Egypt”, the poison was a failure. Although a happy failure, the highly dramatic event in the text is a double criticism towards oppression and poverty on one hand, and towards the massive failure of Egyptian industry and economy, a failure of Egyptian nationalism. Staged in 2019 under a new title: “A Broken Window”, the play shows a middle class family that is stuck between poverty, ignorance, superstition, corruption and the continuous sexual harassment against women.

The Guaranteed Way to Remove Stains

After a long night, a woman decides to murder her lover by putting him into a bathtub full of acid. The play is a long monologue delivered by the woman where she examines how her entire life is shamed and how it has been filled with “stains”. She discovers that everything that she is attached to has been viewed as a stain, that she herself has been seen as a stain. The play is almost the only one of its kind in Egyptian theater where the narrative is entirely constructed from a feminist perspective and where the voice is solely given to the woman to share the prohibited truth of her shamed sexuality and the objectification of her body. Due to the nature of monodrama, the feminist discourse is given the ultimate chance to expand via the discourse of the victimised female character who transforms into a killer. This transformation is neither shamed by the author, nor judged. It could seem that the killing itself has a symbolic value, and that the woman is equally killed while killing her lover. To commit murder in such a horrific way is equal to committing suicide. The Egyptian society witnessed many cases of wives killing their husbands and cutting their bodies to pieces, especially during the 1990’s. This play is the only theatrical text to have tackled the issue.