Tamalyn Dallal
In 2004, I was traveling in Egypt with my friend and fellow dancer, Alexandra. She flipped the pages in her Lonely Planet guidebook and found a remote place called “Siwa.” At that time, we didn’t have smart phones, and depended on guidebooks rather than websites for travel advice. Siwa wasn’t commonly visited as one would have to take a bus ten hours through the desert to get there. We braved the bouncy bus ride to a Bedouin city called Marsa Matruh along Egypt’s north coast.
After 6 hours, we changed from a bus to a collective taxi in a dusty parking lot in Marsa Matruh, with no idea what we were in for or whether it would be worth it. We had another 4 hours to go. Deserts can be romanticized in our western minds. We imagine majestic dunes and camels. The scenery on this trip was bland and rocky. The only respite was drinking desert tea at the rest stops. This was thick, strong and sweet. Yum! Finally, we entered the oasis, surrounded by dust covered palm trees and vegetable gardens. Traditional houses, hand built from a material called “karshif.” (a mixture of mud, salt and other minerals.) lined the road into town. Roman/ Greek tombs could be seen in the distance, as both peoples had dominated Siwa. At the edge of town was the “Oracle of Amun,” an ancient Egyptian temple where Alexander the Great is said to have recieved blessings from the priests to become the next king of Egypt. In the middle of town was the Shali, a five story ruined mud and salt fortress. We climbed the Shali to watch the sunset. Calls to prayer resonated from a multitude of different mosques. It was our magical welcome.
Alexandra and I were smitten by Siwa. We took donkey cart rides with a teenage boy named Fathe, rode a 4 wheel drive into the desert to see dunes at sunset, swam in hot springs and and floated in a salt lake full of salt balls that resembled snow balls. Our time was short. We had to return to Cairo and were not looking forward to another ten hour ride through the desert. With the help of a tour guide, we returned the following year with a group of 19 dancers so they could also experience Siwa.
In 2006, I embarked on a travel narrative book project called “40 Days and 1001 Nights” in which I visited five Muslim cultures for 40 days each and wrote about my experiences. I was motivated to give up everything; my studio, and my apartment in Miami Beach to commit to this project. It was during a time that Muslims were vilified in the US. After 9-11, during the Bush administration, politicians used hatred of Muslims as an excuse to wage war in Afghanistan and Iraq. There was little push back from Americans, who were told “They did it to us during 9-11.” Americans were fearful and misinformed. Our media stoked Islamophobia. I decided to spend time among people and, though I would not become an expert in 40 days, I knew I would be able to come home and share stories of meeting real people whose humanity was worth so much more than what the media made us believe. First, I went to Indonesia. Second, I stayed in the Siwa Oasis, then Zanzibar, Jordan and the Xinjiang Autonomous Region of China.
The Siwa Oasis covers a large area that includes four villages, the largest being Siwa. I met a tour guide named Fathi who was from another town in the Siwa Oasis called Maraqi. He invited me to his families home where his mother taught sewing lessons. Siwa is famous for unique embroidery, which adorns traditional wedding dresses, wedding shawls and the “tarfotet”, which are blue checkered cloths that cloak women for modesty. When we arrived, she was baking bread in a traditional clay oven, fired by palm fronds. Young, unmarried girls found out that I love to dance and urged me to dance with them.
I had been told that if I wanted to see traditional women’s dance of Siwa, I would only see it if the woman was over 90. At a later date, I met a friend’s blind grandmother, who showed me what she could; a shuffling step in a straight line down the hallway of her home. Her dance was remarkably similar to Chaoui dance of Algeria. Much later, I read online that Chaoui comes from an Amazigh word that references rams horns of the Numidian god Amon. Could this, in Algeria, have something to do with Siwa and the Oracle of Amun and those rams horns?
In Maraqi, the girls in the sewing class danced beledi, but it was different from beledi in the main town of Siwa where they danced similar to other Egyptian women, using Egyptian pop songs played from cassette tapes. In Maraqi, they sang and beat on plastic buckets as drums. They didn’t use hands or arms except to hold the space for hip movements. With scarves tied around their hips and wearing long dresses with ruffles, the main difference in their dance and that of the larger town was that their hips were arched back and they were more earthy.
In Siwa, men and women live traditional lives, segregated from one another. Women’s singing voices and their dancing must be done indoors, out of ear shot from men. Men dance and played music outside, far from town. It could be in the desert or in a garden (farm.) Men and women are never allowed to dance together or anywhere near each other. On a visit to Cairo, I asked Mahmoud Reda about his Siwa dance style. He explained to me that the Reda Company represented different parts of Egypt and that many dances were created by him based on his experiences and research. Sometimes people would teach his ideas as folklore, but some of the dances were his creation. For example, the Sugar Doll dance represented beloved sugar dolls sold at festivals during childhood, or the Melaya showed women of a certain time and character. In Siwa, he couldn’t see the women. The women of the Reda Company were not shown the way women danced either. So he asked children to show how their mothers danced, while wearing traditional embroidered wedding clothes. He added that some of the moves done by men would not have been acceptable on a theatrical stage in those days. He had to modify them.
Mahmoud Reda was a trailblazer and innovator and I hold nothing against his interpretation of Siwan dance. I feel that times have changed and people are more aware of sensitivity toward minorities through out the world. The Siwan people are Amazigh, They are indigenous to the area and have their own language and culture.
There are Amazigh people across North Africa, but Siwa is the only place in Egypt where they live. They are marginalized in Egypt and their traditions are often trampled upon. There are “Easterners” and Westerners”, comprising 11 tribes. One of the tribes is Bedouin, which is totally different from Siwan as Bedu are Arabs. Each tribe has its own shaikh or tribal leader, who settles land disputes, legal matters, etc. The Egyptian government imposes Egyptian law on Siwa, often quite harshly.
Some concerns I have about how Siwan dance is presented in the foreign dance world now are based on the dances that Mahmoud Reda created, which were from fifty years ago. Now, Some teachers teach Siwan dance in workshops globally. The culture is not discussed. I saw this happen in a workshop with at least 90 students in China. The participants were hungry for authentic culture. But by the time it got to them it was unrecognizable. It would be good if a new generation of Egyptian dance ethnologists would revisit Siwa and talk to the people, and get a consensus on how they would like to be represented.
As I mentioned before, women live very separate lives in Siwa. Once married, they cover themselves in a tarfotet and a black cloth covers their faces, eyes and all. They socialize completely separated from unrelated men. Women never dance with men nor in the proximity of men. I don’t know what the women’s movements would have been like at the time Reda did his research, but the videos I see of Siwan dance show theatrical renditions with men and women dancing separately, but ending up dancing together on stage, wearing wedding dresses. Some of the people who saw that in Siwa were upset by it.
Siwan men’s dances range from Zagallah, which are farm workers. Long ago, they were paid in dates and olives, and sometimes could not raise the money to get married. Until 1928, same sex marriage was legal in Siwa. Even when they married women, sometimes they couldn’t marry until they were older, and stayed with one another until then. Egyptians often ridiculed this and made same sex marriage illegal.
Some men’s dances were folkloric in nature, representing the farmers. Others were more sensual. I filmed a group where one of the men was dressed as a woman, and his wife’s father was the leader of the band. It was not unusual to have someone represent the female aspect of dance among men, since it was not possible to have a Siwan woman present. Men also danced, moving their hips, shuffling their feet, and undulating. Traditionally, men drank homemade date wine before dancing, which was not legal, but very common.
One can easily see Siwan men dancing with tourists when they take them on trips to the desert. Tourists, both male and female are welcome to dance with them around the camp fire. Local women are never present. When I was there, there was a regional folkloric troupe from Siwa who would travel within Egypt or outside the country to perform. It was made up entirely of men, playing music, with vocals and dance.
I have been to Siwan dance workshops in China and other countries. The culture of Siwa was not discussed in detail. There is a danger of having a room full of women across the world learning this version of a culture. It is more destructive to a culture that is already in peril. I think this is done innocently. They teach what they learned, which is information gathered 50 years ago under difficult conditions. The rooms full of foreign dancers, eager to learn authenticity, absorb what they teach. The people of Siwa get mis-represented with no input of their own.
If you visit Egypt, it is much easier to go to Siwa than it was on my first visit 20 years ago. There are tours to Siwa. Some are organized by knowledgeable people in the Oriental dance community. Tourism helps the economy of the oasis. But it is important to visit with respect, understanding that their culture is in peril. Many times throughout the years, people in Siwa expressed their worries about being exposed to the outside world. There was talk of building an airport or a paved road from Cairo to Siwa. Both ideas met with resistance and claims that such easy access would expose the culture to masses who would consume and contaminate their way of life.
If you would like to read more, my book “40 Days and 1001 Nights” (2007) is available from me if you send me a message at tamalyndallal@yahoo.com. Also, a rough cut musical documentary with one section on Siwa is available on daturaonline.com. Also called “40 Days and 1001 Nights.” It is a visual accompaniment to the book. An important locally published book about Siwa is available online: Siwa Oasis by Ahmed Fakry, Website with information on Siwan dance. Traditional Siwan music performed at a hotel
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