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“Affectueusement, Laila”: Being a Communist “Foreign” Woman in Post-colonial Egypt

By Rim Naguib

This text is an excerpt of an article by Rim Naguib that was published in “Gendered Cosmopolitanism in Colonial and Post-Colonial Egypt” (afriche e orienti, Vol 28, no 1.) Read the full article here.

On 17 April 1953, Mimi left the cheap room she rented at Hotel Esedra in Rome and set off to Alexandria, Egypt. She had a passport and a tourist visa, but hers was not an ordinary trip. The day before, she had asked a hairdresser to make her look like someone else. From the Ciampino airport near Rome, she wrote a letter to her dearest friend and comrade exiled in Paris, Henri Curiel, with words filled with excitement and emotions.[1]

She landed in Alexandria, her hometown, with a racing heart. Luckily, the Egyptian border policeman inspecting the passport of a French woman called Honorine which she carried, did not suspect a clandestine return of the formerly deported communist, Noémie Canel. He could not have guessed that fifteen months earlier, this young woman of 25, carrying a regular tourist’s document, was escorted by the police from the prison of Cairo, where she had served a three-year sentence for “subversive political activity”, to Alexandria to be shipped away to Italy.[2]

Noémie’s Vacances plans (code word for clandestine return) had succeeded. She was back to the country she wanted to live in and be part of its struggle against Anglo-American imperialism, oppression and the exploitation of the working masses. She was back to her chère famille (code word for her organization), the Mouvement Démocratique de Libération Nationale (MDLN), and to her comrade husband whom she married during her incarceration, Kamal Abdel Halim, known in the movement as Khalil or Kelly.

A few months earlier, on 26 July 1952, the Free Officers had toppled the monarchy in Egypt, and both Henri Curiel and Noémie rejoiced at the coup, seeing it as an opportunity for their return and a step forward towards a free Egypt.[3] However, barely seven months after her happy return, in November 1953, she would be arrested again, and this time condemned to eight years of imprisonment with hard labor, at the end of which she would be deported again.

The following years in Noémie’s personal and political struggles would be recorded in her prolific correspondence with the Rome Group—the offshoot of MDLN in exile formed in Paris by the deported members of the movement—particularly her letters to Henri Curiel (code name: Jacques,Younes), to Joyce Blau (Colette), and to her family living in Israel and Italy. Noémie Canel’s trajectory illuminates the process by which the Jewish Egyptian communists of the post-war movement were made into “foreigners” and “Jews”. Her letters—mostly signed in her nom de guerre Laila—give a close insight into how people like her struggled against their exclusion.

The Rome Group archive, housed at the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam, contains hundreds of letters and reports written by and about Noémie in the period 1948–59, which constitute the material used for this study. She remained in political prison for a total of 11 years, and was deported twice despite her tireless efforts to stay in Egypt and be part of its national and communist struggle. Yet, the historiography of the Egyptian communist movement is almost devoid of any mention of her name(s) or existence. She shares this absence with other “foreign” communist women, despite the critical work they contributed to the movement.[4]

Rifaat al-Said’s authoritative history of Egyptian communism for instance never mentions Joyce Blau, Didar Fawzy-Rossano, Noémie Canel or Marie Rosenthal. Likewise, historians who addressed the predominance of Jews in the movement such as Selma Botman (1986), Rami Ginat (2011), Raouf Abbas (1988), and Joel Beinin (1998), have focused on Jewish men who occupied leadership positions, and hardly mention the women communists. Significantly, when female members of the movement are mentioned, they are often not identified by their name, but figure in designations such as: “a foreign woman comrade”, or “the wife of…”.

This paper addresses this absence in the historiography, as well as the marginalization of “foreign” women communists in the movement. During their years of activism, they were rarely to be found in leading positions in the movement, however devoted they were to the cause. They were instead relegated to the non-intellectual, non-political tasks of courier/liaison in the gendered distribution of roles. Their feminized activism remained however critical to the movement. It was they who carried out the invisible work of care-giving: from sustaining the political prisoners and their families to reinforcing the bonds among members of the movement in and out of prison, and in and out of Egypt, especially at times of crises and factionalism. In that sense, the role of Noémie Canel, as well as the role of Joyce Blau, Didar Fawzy-Rossano, and others, was gendered and marginalized during their years of activism, and retrospectively remarkably overlooked in the male-dominated historiography.

I will further argue that the nature of the activism of the “foreign” women liaisons resulted in the fusion of their personal and political life and aspirations, making contingent the personal fate of Noémie on that of the movement, and particularly on the fate of the increasingly excluded “foreign” Jewish communists. Ultimately, the defeat of the movement, and the inability of Egypt’s Jewish communists to maintain their place in the movement or in the country, meant her personal defeat. The experience of seeing her deepest aspirations and ideals vanish, while incarcerated, ultimately broke her, both physically and emotionally. In April 1959, she would write in one of her last letters to Curiel, “My dear Jacques, I never imagined I would be broken like this. Everything is falling apart around me. I had better leave you now, but please accept a strong handshake from your former comrade, Laila”.[5] What ensued after her liberation at the end of 1961 was a complete volte-face to her past convictions and aspirations.

Jews and “Foreigners” in Second-wave Egyptian Communist Movement

MDLN (or HADETO in Arabic: al-Haraka al-Dimuqratiyya l-il Taharror al-Watani), was formed out of a merger of organizations conceived predominantly by Jewish so-called “foreigners”.[6] The merger was largely the initiative of Henri Curiel, a Sephardic Jew born in Egypt to a wealthy family with Italian nationality. HADETO’s first Central Committee included him and two Jews, among a total of 15 members. Shortly after its foundation in the summer of 1947, HADETO became the most influential communist group in mobilizing protests and strikes around the demands for the independence of Egypt and Sudan from British colonialism, democracy, nationalization of big industries, and redistribution of land. It struck roots in various sectors of Egyptian society. HADETO and the communist movement in general was nevertheless riven with factionalism, alternating with attempts at unity, partly over issues of “Egyptianization” (Al-Said 1988).[7]

Historians of Egyptian communism have all addressed the large presence of “foreigners” and Jews within the organizations that launched the “second-wave” (Botman 1986; 1988; Al-Said 1988).[8] This paper will use the category of “foreigner” critically and, along Joel Beinin (1998: 6), will adopt the premise that “ethnonational identities are historically and socially constructed”. This is especially important in the case of the Jewish communists of Egypt, as the term “foreigner” here designated individuals who were born in Egypt, and who did not necessarily possess foreign nationality. Rather than corresponding to an actual legal status, the term—as it has been historically used—bear a clear extension from the colonial-era distinction between local and European subjects, which bestowed substantial advantages on those among the population who could claim European subject status or protection, by virtue of the Capitulations (Hanley 2017). With the abrogation of the latter in 1937, “foreigner” still designated residents of European descent, even those who had opted for Egyptian nationality at their reaching adolescence (as stipulated by the 1929 Egyptian nationality law), such as Henri Curiel, or those who were born into families who migrated from different parts of the Ottoman Empire and did not possess any nationality other than the obsolete Ottoman subject status (as in the case of Noémie before acquiring Italian nationality through marriage). Some of these “foreigners” indeed kept their inherited European subject status, but never lived or had intended to live in the European country of their citizenship before their deportation, such as Joyce Blau (Perrault 1984). Certainly, the “cosmopolitanism” of Egyptian Jewish communists was a determining factor in their earning the “foreign” appellation: they were all schooled and socialized in francophone institutions and communities, and few of them mastered the written Arabic, or spoke the language fluently. Their families had historically been well-connected to European commercial centers and tended thereof to benefit from the resulting legal and economic privileges (Beinin 1998: 6).

In this sense, there existed a large disparity between the way many Egyptian Jewish communists felt and acted in terms of their belonging in Egypt on the one hand, and on the other hand, the way they were perceived as foreigners, i.e. European, and outsiders to Egyptian society and political community. They strove to prove their loyalty and patriotism to Egypt, perhaps by virtue of this ambivalent position they occupied (Ginat 2011: 4); “the more political developments appeared to lead to the conclusion that they could not be accepted as Egyptians or participate fully in Egyptian politics, the more they insisted on asserting their commitment to Egypt” (Beinin 1998: 149). In the case of Noémie, working towards her égyptianisation would drive her to great sacrifices.[9]

Regardless of the legal and social bases of the categorization of the Jewish communists of Egypt as foreigners, it served the state well in its policing of communism. The second-wave was heavily repressed, both before and after the Free Officers’ coup in 1952. In the process, “foreigners” (or “local subjects of foreign extraction” in British colonial terminology) were singled out for deportation; an established practice since the British campaign against Bolshevism in inter-war Egypt (Naguib 2020). Accusations of Zionism were also conveniently leveled against Jewish communists of the second wave, especially following the participation of Egypt in the war in Palestine and the declaration of Martial Law on 15 May 1948. This was exacerbated by the communists’ endorsement, along with the USSR, of the UN partition plan and the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. The arrest of Jewish communists was thus concomitant with the arrest of Jewish Zionists, and the state deliberately confounded the two (Beinin 1998). Thus, 1948 struck a deadly blow to the already precarious position of the “foreign” Jewish communists (Perrault 1984: 195).[10] Put succinctly by Joel Beinin (1989: 160), “already marginalized by their embrace of European culture, [the creation of the state of Israel made Egyptian Jews] into potential enemies of Egypt”.

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Notes

[1] – The International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam (hereafter IISH), The papers of Egyptian Communists in Exile—Rome Group (hereafter RG) 20, Laila letter to Jacques, 18 April 1953. Noémie Canel figures in the archives under several code-names, including Mimi, Michou, Josette, Lili, Mirelle, and Laila. In this article, I will refer to her as Noémie, Mimi and Laila, interchangeably.

[2] – IISH RG 93, Note Concernant le cas de Noémie Canel, August 1959.

[3] – IISH RG 143, letter from Jacques to Laila, 31 July 1952.

[4] – For a discussion of the “invisibilisation” of women activists in communist historiography, see Strazzeri (2022). For a similar treatment of the absence in the early historiography of women in the Tunisian communist movement, see Abassade (2020).

[5] – IISH RG 91/1959, Laila letter to Jacques, 5 April 1959.

[6] – One may say that the term foreigners designated “primarily francophone local minorities” residing in Egypt, as explained succinctly by Beinin J., Egypt’s Henri Curiel Was a Revolutionary Beyond Borders, in “Jacobin”, 2024, https://jacobin.com/2024/09/henri-curiel-egyptian-communism-jews (last accessed on 17 September 2024).

[7] – There were disagreements about the identity of the Jewish “foreigners” and its political consequences on the communist movement, and subsequently about the nature and extent of the necessary Egyptianization, although there was a consensus that it was politically desirable to promote indigenous Egyptian leaders. See Beinin (1998: 144–45).

[8] – The “second-wave” refers to the communist organizations that emerged during or in the aftermath of the Second World War and their splinters, some of which remained active until self-dissolution in 1965.

[9] – IISH RG 91/ 1958, Laila letter to Jacques, 26 December 1958.

[10] – Quoting Raymond Stambouli, a member of the Rome Group.


References

Abbas R. (1988), Awrāq Henri Curiel wa-l Haraka al-Shoyūʿiyya al-Misriyya [The Papers of Henri Curiel and the Egyptian Communist Movement], Cairo, Sina Publishers.

Abassade É. (2020), Des militantes du désordre. Femmes et communistes à Tunis, 1921–1922, in “Le mouvement social,” n. 272, pp. 145–58.

Al-Said R. (1988), Tārīkh al-Haraka al-Shoyūʿiyya al-Misriyya, 1940–1950 [History of the Egyptian Communist Movement, 1940–1950], Cairo, Shirkat al-Amal.

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About the Author

Rim Naguib received her PhD in Sociology from Northwestern University (2016) and her MA from Sciences Po Aix-en-Provence (2006). Her PhD dissertation is titled “Intelligentsia Class Formation and Ideologies in Peripheral Societies: Comparing Egypt and Iran, 1922–1952”. She was a post-doctoral fellow with the Arab Council for the Social Sciences. Based in Cairo, she taught in several alternative education initiatives, seeking to popularize the critical social sciences. Her research interests address three different, but not unrelated, fields: the colonial practice of ideological-ethnic deportation of internationalist foreigners and ‘local subjects of foreign extraction’ in the policing of communism in interwar Egypt; the post-colonial securitisation of Egyptian nationality legislation and practice and of the management of foreigners’ residence; and the political and cultural history of Egyptian patriarchal nationalism. She is currently working on her book manuscript, Undesirable Subjects: Deportation in Colonial and Post-colonial Egypt 1914–1971. She is also writing and illustrating a graphic biography of Joseph Rosenthal (1872–1965), and has co-translated several graphic novels into Arabic. In the academic year 2019/20, Rim Naguib was a EUME Fellow and continued her EUME Fellowship in 2020–22 through a stipend by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation. From 2022 to 2024, she was a EUME Research Associate at the Forum Transregionale Studien and continues to be a Fellow of EUME from 2024–26 with a scholarship of the Gerda Henkel Foundation.


Citation: Rim Naguib, “Affectueusement, Laila”: Being a Communist “Foreign” Woman in Post-colonial Egypt, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 23.01.2025, https://doi.org/10.58079/13520


OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
Forum Transregionale Studien (23. Januar 2025). “Affectueusement, Laila”: Being a Communist “Foreign” Woman in Post-colonial Egypt. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Abgerufen am 18. Februar 2025 von https://doi.org/10.58079/13520


Forum Transregionale Studien

The Berlin-based Forum Transregionale Studien promotes the internationalization of research in the humanities and social sciences. It provides scope for collaboration among researchers with different regional and disciplinary perspectives and appoints researchers from all over the world as Fellows. More...

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