Aug 08, 2015
Latifa al-Zayyat’s 92nd Birthday
This Doodle’s Key Themes
Today we pay tribute to novelist, activist, and scholar Latifa al-Zayyat (1923-1996). Her best-known novel, The Open Door, chronicles political unrest in midcentury Cairo through the eyes of its young protagonist, Layla. Layla is a semi-autobiographical character: Al-Zayyat, like Layla, was inspired to become an activist at a very young age. (You can see Layla's name, in Arabic, at the center of today's design.)
The Open Door was revolutionary, when it was published in 1960, not only for its narration by a female protagonist, but also for its use of natural speech and its dual challenge to political and cultural authorities. But Al-Zayyat's bravery extended beyond her fiction. She was incarcerated once in her twenties, when she was a leader in the Students' and Workers' National Committee, and again in her sixties, after she formed the Committee for Defense of National Culture. While a professor at Cairo University, Al-Zayyat advanced our understanding of how female characters function in Arabic novels, while also bringing Anglo-American literary scholarship into the Egyptian academy by translating works of New Criticism into Arabic.
Al-Zayyat, who died in 1996, wrote her memoirs while she was in prison. Her tireless work was driven by a belief that self-fulfillment comes through devotion to a broader community. "One can only find one's self," she wrote, "by initially losing it to a much wider issue than one's own subjectivity."
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