Summary
The greatest and most famous singer of the twentieth-century Arab world, in essay 31 of Edward Said’s Reflections on Exile and Other Essays: her records and cassettes, fifteen years after her death, are available everywhere, and in Egypt she was a national symbol, respected both during the monarchy and after the revolution led by Gamal Abdel Nasser (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.331).
Details
- A fair number of non-Arabs know about her too, partly because of the hypnotic and melancholy effect of her singing, partly because in the worldwide rediscovery of authentic people’s art she is a dominant figure (PDF p.331).
- She played a significant role in the emerging Third World women’s movement as a pious “Nightingale of the East” whose public exposure was as a model not only of feminine consciousness but also of domestic propriety; talk about whether or not she was a lesbian was overridden by the sheer force of her performances of elevated music set to classical verse (PDF p.331).
- Her extraordinarily long career was to most Arabs the highly respectable while very romantic tip of the eroticism typified by the belly-dancer (PDF p.331).
- She performed at King Farouk’s wedding in 1936, the lavish party that was also Tahia Carioca’s debut (PDF p.331).
- In Tahia Carioca’s own account of the nationalist revival in the arts, the singers included Um Kalthoum and Abdel Wahhab (PDF p.337).
Related pages
Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Tahia Carioca, Gamal Abdel Nasser