Interview with Hala Kamal

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Interview with Hala Kamal
2013
TAPE 1
Nicola Pratt: Can you tell me when and where you were born?
Hala Kamel: Right, it's rather... it's the first time I'm asked this question in an interview. I
was born in Kuwait because my father is Egyptian and my mother is Polish. They had
met in Poland in the fifties and then when my father was studying and my mother was
studying in France, she came to Egypt and they got married in 67 when the war with
Israel... she was here. And they decided to get married, and at that time, my father was
working at the ministry of culture, and he was working in Kuwait, he was the generation
of Egyptians of the sixties whom Nassir sent to work in other Arab countries as part of
the pan-Arab project. So my father was a folklorist and he was there to establish the
centre for folklore studies in Kuwait. And I was born on the 11th of July 1968, one of the
first children to be born in the Kuwait hospital. So I had my first years of education in
Kuwait. First in a private school and then when Kuwait started developing, I was moved
to a national public school because the state started investing in education. And I
finished my high school in Egypt; we came after Sadat's peace with Israel. Of course in
the Arab countries, Egyptians were being subjected to different kinds of unpleasant
situations, and therefore, my father who was patriotic, who did not choose to keep
silent about his position in support of his government decided that he would not be able
to work in such circumstances. So, we came back and it was already the plan that I
would come here to study at university. There were no plans to stay on forever in
Kuwait anyway. So I came and did my high school degree and then I got to Cairo
University. I wanted to study English literature. I wanted to become a literary critic, so
this was my initial... a journalist basically. I studies at Cairo University for 4 years, I think
very important and formative years, they supported all the things that we were being
taught at home, the idea of multi-cultures and the idea of tolerance, the wide view of
the world and so on. And this is something that I think I was very lucky to have
reinforced during these important years at university, in addition to my closer
engagement with the Egyptian society, this being not a private elitist kind of place but
more of an institution where you can find the average Egyptians represented widely. At
that time, I was already interested in reading Nawal Al-Sa'dawi, Latifa Al-Zayat, it was
quite a figure to me. And at home, we had loads of books, so it was to me a natural
thing to read a lot. I was very lucky because I came top of my class in the last year, in the
last two years of my studies. I was second on my class in the first year and the second
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year, and then third year of my studies and fourth year... so this in Egyptian universities
gives you the possibility of becoming appointed at the university as a junior assistant
and continue an academic career. Since my father was an academic and my mother was
considered by many people, not talking about myself, as an intellectual in many ways.
So it was quite a privilege for me to end up in this line and start this kind of a career. I
was also lucky because I started working on my master's. I was interested in
representations of women, we're talking year 1990 when I graduated. Already my
fourth year project in what we called an honor subject because some students could
choose additional courses and I wrote a paper I remember on representations of
women in Thomas Moor's "Utopia". So, there was something there; there was this
interest there, probably because of the reading that I had access to, women's writings;
May Zyada, Latifa Al-Zayat, and so on. So, for my master's, I felt much closer reading
women's writings than men's writings. I read a lot as I said, but I felt some kind of closer
affinity, and I decided for my master's to do... it just happened that I attended summer
school. I got a scholarship from the British Council. I attended a summer school in 1992
in Scotland, Edinburgh for a month and a half. Yes, it was six weeks. So I had a proper
library, and this is where I came across Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, an Indian of origin,
German family background, who married an Indian and lived in India, lived in England,
lived in the States. So for me, this was perhaps something that also would shed light on
my own identity, this mixture and moving between cultures, religions, and so on. And I
was fascinated by her work at that time, and I chose her for my master's topic. When I
came back from the summer school, the British Council announced an MA scholarship
so I applied. I went to Leeds where I did my master's on cross-culture encounters in the
works of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. When I came back in 1995, of course I was promoted to
assistant lecturer, this is how you move on within a national university in Egypt. You
become a junior assistant upon your first degree, when you're one of the top students,
and then once you do your master's you become assistant lecturer, and then you
become lecturer which is the equivalent of assistant professor in the American system,
and then you become associate professor based on you research, a professor and so on.
So I came back and it was 1995 when Huda Sadda was thinking of the women and
memory forum, and it was Huda Sadda, Umayma Abu Bakr, plus Sumayya Ramadan, an
artist writer with whose work I was just beginning to get familiar with because she had
just published a collection of short stories, and Huda Lutfi, an artist. Again, she was
having... she was an academic, a historian at AUC, and at that time, she was having her
first art gallery, not gallery, exhibition. And so they were the founders of the women and
memory research group. And Huda Sadda approached me to be the research assistant,
so this is how I started working. Of course, before that, I had translated a number of
short stories by Indian writers into Arabic, so this was kind of my interest, and I was still
beginning to think of what I would like to do next with my PhD. It took me a little longer
than normal in many ways because I did not move from one step to the other
immediately. I think I put some effort in the establishment of women and memory,
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helping with the establishment of women and memory, and then in 1997, we became
an independent entity, not a research group, not the women and memory forum. And at
that time, I was beginning to realize that I would like to do work less on fiction but more
on personal narratives. And I started developing a special interest in autobiographies.
So, I decided to so my PhD on immigrant women's writing in the United States.
Particularly, I chose 4 writers, academics: Elmaz Abinader, Lebanese, art performer,
third generation Lebanese writer "Children of the Roojme" and I chose an Armenian
American. It's about her grandma's journey from Armenia, the genocide and all this, the
history and this baggage. So these were the two writers who were academics and at the
same time third generation. I chose 2 other writers who were themselves immigrants
who decided to stay. Leila Ahmad who had just published her autobiography "A Border
Passage", and Chinese Shirley Lim who was a theorist academic focusing on ethnic
women's writing. I started working on this and then I got a chance to... I have an uncle
who lives in the States, so I went to collect material because here of course the situation
is miserable concerning if you wanted to see this research. So I went, I spent 3 months
in the summer with my uncle and aunt who both taught at Smith College in North
Hampton, Massachusetts, a women's college. And since the academic starts here a little
later, we used to begin first of October, while there they start first of September, I had
September and I asked whether I could audit some classes. I was fascinated with the
idea of a women's college, the women's archives, the Smith archive and the women
studies courses because this was something completely new to me. And Suzan
(Inaudible 0:11:44:3) who was the chair of the women studies department or program.
It was the women studies program. This was 1999, 1998, sorry the summer of 1998. I
attended a month and then she together with professor Pissarose of the American
diploma, it's a graduate diploma, they told me that there's a possibility for international
students. It's a very expensive college, so there would have been no possibility for me to
study there on my own. And they told me that they have a scholarship for international
students to come and do a one year diploma in American studies, but I said I'm not
particularly interested in American studies as a discipline, and they told me that the
good thing about this program is that you have people doing political science you have
people doing media studies, you have people doing education, everything. What you do
is you start doing... the program is a one academic year program whereby you have one
course per term. It's a seminar on women in American studies, American history, and
then you can choose whichever courses you want, three per term, and write a baby
thesis as they call it. So what I did was I applied and I got accepted so I spent the
academic year of 1999-2000, I graduated... and then I wrote my baby thesis. I had asked
my supervisor, Cairo University professor Huda Al-Hindi whether I could use some of the
work that I had started doing here for my PhD at Cairo University because I had
registered for my degree at Cairo University, whether I could use it there doing papers,
whether this was possible. I wasn't sure whether this was ethically okay. She told me it
was fine as long as I didn't publish anything because then... now it's different but then
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your PhD had to be completely new in the sense that it should not be published or have
any parts of it published. So I said I'm not publishing, it's going to be just so that I use
this here in a way to feed into my work. And there I asked my supervising professor
Suzan Vandein whether I could be doing my baby thesis on something that is connected
to my PhD, and she told me "fine". So, I did a part that helped me develop the
theoretical bit of my PhD on theorizing the personal. And I looked at 2 texts at that
point, not before. So this is basically... I came back in 2000 and then I got very much
involved with women and memory. I think this was because women and memory gives
you exposure to other areas of research, but at the same time, I think to me, women
and memory is my window to activism because it is the way through which I manage to
get in touch with the Egyptian feminist movement, something about which I used to
read but was not part of. So this is basically... does this answer your question?
NP: Yeah. May I ask some details? Some things? Okay. How was it growing up in Egypt?
Well, Kuwait then Egypt? And with mixed parentage?
HK: In Kuwait, it was because we were foreigners, so for me, the identity was that we
were not Kuwaitis. This awareness of this mixture I didn't become conscious of it until a
little later, mostly when I came back to Egypt, because this is where it became clear that
we are not foreigners but Egypt and Poland are part of our identity. In Kuwait, because
Kuwaitis were a very closed community and mostly our circles were Egyptian families
and even more so Arab Polish families. Because mothers are usually the ones who
create those networks of social life. So basically I grew up... the friends that I have till
today are Arab-Polish, Lebanese and Polish Palestinian, Jordanian with whom I keep in
touch until today, I mean because they ended up in Poland for different political reasons
of course as we can imagine. So for me, I wasn't... we were 3 girls, 3 sisters, so at home,
we did not experience any kind of discrimination on the base of gender. And at the
same time, we were raised in a family where my mother was Polish, she spoke to us in
Polish. My father was Egyptian, he spoke to us in Egyptian. That was not Kuwaiti, that
was not Palestinian because most of the teachers at school were Palestinian. So as I
said, we were part of... I would say even perhaps the Polish identity was stronger than
the Egyptian, because we were not part of the Egyptian community as much as we were
part of the Polish versus... outside, inside. You know the house and within the home and
outside. I have very fond memories of my childhood in Kuwait because we lived... there
was the beaches and the sea. So in the summer, every weekend, we were setting up a
tent at the beach and spending the whole day there, and you just cross the street, and
in the winter, we would have the desert. We would drive for about half an hour and be
in the middle of the desert, again with a tent with friends, and... so basically this. At
home as I said we had both languages moving on. My parents... my father understood
Polish because of the year he spent in Poland, but he never practiced, he never used the
language. My mother had studied Arabic, she had originally done her... when they
married, she stopped at the point when she was about to finish her PhD on
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representation of the Egyptian society in early 20th century fiction. So she knew the
language, she could lead fluently. Of course her spoken was, as you can imagine, heavily
accented. There were both religions at home because my mother was a Roman Catholic
and mu father Muslim. Probably my mother because of her attempt at asserting her
identity, she was more of a practicing Catholic than my father was a practicing Muslim.
We had Islam in school because automatically, you know, according to the father. So the
father is Muslim, your documents... (Inaudible 0:19:25:4) but because my father was a
folklore scholar and my mother was in many ways culturally very interested in this
combination of her background, combination of literature and sociology because this
was her area. So the discussions at home were very interesting in that sense. I don't
think I was at any point conscious of being in any way different. As my mother used to
say, we're not half-half, we are one plus one. Perhaps this gave me and my sisters a
sense of privilege, in Egypt, it was slightly different because you came in a society where
you have Copts. In Kuwait, there were no Copts. Throughout my life, I had the... the
surprise was to realize that one of my class mates in primary school, I remember her, I
remember the way she looks but I don't remember her name, that she was Christian.
And to me this was strange because in Kuwait you had no Christians. Christians were
basically foreigners. When we came to Egypt it was different; you had Christians in your
class room. It was part of culture. On TV you had Christmas Eve mass with Pope
Shnouda showing up. So the issue of religion was not... at home, we never had this
issue, we celebrated all Christian feasts and they were family celebrations. We had all
the Muslim feasts, my mother even used to do things that were not very common
among other Egyptian families, probably the folklore dimension my father's... rice
pudding for instance on Prophet Mohammad's Mawlid. So certain things that were
probably more cultural than religious I think. And my first interaction with in a way the
Muslim society, I remember was at university, because this is where you had a room
where girls would pray during prayer time. For the first time they had lessons, so Hiba
Ra'ouf who's now a big name in Islamic studies was then a junior assistant at the faculty
of political science. She used to come to the faculty of arts to the girls' prayer room and
give religious lectures. I attended one or two and I think we clashed. I remember that I...
not a clash as much as I was a little inquisitive and then I was seen as being disruptive. I
don't know whether she remembers it. We see each other and we meet of course, but
of course I remember because I was a student and she was you know, this junior
assistant at the faculty of political science. But if you'd like to know about my... in my
case, I do not define myself as religious at all. I have read in religious and around
religions. I have... Buddhism, Hinduism, it was something that was intriguing to me
because I was raised in this setup and I felt at a point that I needed to make a conscious
choice rather than just follow, and then follow whom and what? Because my mother
used to go to churches and we used to go with her, so I know many of the prayers. So, I
think that for me, it was more like choosing the... looking at the similarities rather than
the differences. And this is what strikes me as a method of analysis, that people usually
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try to look at differences in critical approaches even to a literary text. So students used
to focus on what marks this as different from... and to me, I catch myself up till today
when I'm teaching a course like comparative literature for instance for undergraduate
students, that I'm more focused on similarities. I'm less concerned with differences. This
is something that consciously has to be revised and I think my feminist dimension is in a
way highlighting this to me, that difference is an important thing. So, I do not practice
wither this or that, but I'm familiar with both quite well I'd say.
NP: It's interesting that you've spoken about the religious aspect of identity. Is this
what... when you came to Egypt after Kuwait, is this the aspect of identity that was most
though about or...
HK: It wasn't at school when I came to school. It was at university. And of course now
when you look, in retrospect, these were the late eighties, early nineties. This is where
the Islamic movement was given freehand at the expense of the socialists and Marxists.
And of course, I quickly switched because I had my stages. As I said, I used to attend
even those classes given by... it took me a term, not a whole year, second year I
remember. This was the year... no problem... that has to do with university not with the
Egyptian society. And this was of course, to me because this was all new. I wasn't sure
what this is all about, but then I got into the Marxist circles at university. So, you know, I
did readings here and there, but to me, this was a very clear thing. Now when people
speak of Mubarak's giving space for Islamists, I can remember that from my
undergraduate years of course. And then later on, I got involved with the March 9th
movement from the autonomy of universities and independence, academic freedoms.
It's a campus opposition movement. I was one of the founders in 2003- 2004. So to me,
I'm aware of all the politics, but I don't... this wasn't something that to me was a mark of
the Egyptian society as much of Cairo University. We had students, I remember our
colleagues during elections coming ... we would have class at 12 knowing that usually
professors come in 15 minutes later than the time because they give us time to move
from one place to the other, from one classroom to the other. And within these 15
minutes, they would come and lecture us religion, and you know giving us different
brochures and things. So they were a very visible presence on campus at the same time
when people who later one... we would see that there were other students who would
put up what we call wall papers, wall press, and then it gets torn off and then later on, I
know that this is Lamees who was a Marxist when I was a first year student, and I'd see
those clashes between... and they were empowered. So this is all part of the whole
thing, part of university which at the end is microcosm although I didn't see that within
my family and my closer friends. But it was quite clear on campus, and perhaps one of
the indicators is that when we were in first year, we were a group of 40 in our section,
and we had only one veiled colleague. By the time we were in fourth year, they had not
only doubled but perhaps triples, the number of veiled girls. So there was this very
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obvious action where universities became the ground for Islamist... I don't know what
you can call it, propaganda, whatever.
NP: You mentioned that you sort of joined Marxist circles. First of all, what was the
opportunity for that? How easy was it? And also what sort of activities were Marxist
students involved in?
HK: Right. Of course this is long history. But unlike Islamist students and they had their
stuff hanging everywhere; the Marxists had a little point at the entrance to the main
library. This was a kind of a get together, and through friends of friends of friends of
friends, because I used to go in and out, so they used to stand there and discuss things,
so I'd meet a friend and they the discussion would move on to a certain point. And then
because at that time I was interested in theatres, attending plays connected to my
studies in a way, but also a little wider because my parents used to go to art galleries
and the opera since we were children. So I was becoming more interested in
independent... that is now known as the generation of the nineties or my generation
who started independent theatre, who started independent publishing and so on. And
you would meet those people who you'd see at the steps of the main library in front of
the faculty of arts, our department, you would see then in whatever and then you would
go and sit at a cafe and discuss and so on. At that time of course, 1990, there was the...
later on, the war, Kuwait- Iraq, and you had the demonstrations. I think the first
demonstration I walked in was again a Nasserist. I didn't realize it was a Nasserist
demonstration when I was an undergraduate. I went with a friend, they were
TAPE 2
HK: marching across the... and then they started chanting something about Nasser, I
don't know what, and I decided I'm leaving, and my friend decided that he's leaving too
because we were not at that point for Nasser as a person. We liked the chants about
social justice, about students' rights and so on, but once they started glorifying a figure, I
remember that me and my friend just... at the same time, more or less, just left. So this
was basically... if you're asking me, I was never involved politically in a group on campus,
so I would not be able to help you with that, but it's just things that I saw. And I said the
Marxists to me.. It was these intellectual kind of discussions by well read people rather
than those coming and lecturing you, trying to take the 15 minutes. You know the whole
thing, if you think ethically, which is something that we read about, ethics as a
philosophy, as students you find that this is ethical and this is unethical. I think this in a
way helps you take particular stands or part, decide that this is my side, this is where I
would rather stand.
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NP: Did you have, apart from the intellectual and cultural aspects of these circles, was
there also any discussion or any awareness at the time on your part about injustices
within Egypt?
HK: Yes, I could see it on campus because we had students who came to university
driving new cars, who would not attend very frequently because they were already
helping their parents with their businesses, and at the same time you had students who
stood in line to get financial aid. This was very visible, the class dimension was stark
visible on campus to me, this became very clear. Taking into part also the fact that the
department of English is in a way a space in which, then, you had students who did the
GSE which was the British diploma, which is now the IGCSE, whatever, which was
something that cost a lot and you had to do it by the British Council, the Cambridge
degree. There were students who came from international schools, they were very few
at that time, there were students who came from international schools in the Arab
countries where their parents' backgrounds. And also you had students who came from
national schools who studies English just as a subject for many years, and made an
effort. So you had this kind of, I'd say... not too poetic mosaic, but this kind of... which is
something that we maintain until today. We refuse to put a requirement of being a
graduate of an English language school or whatever. We have a degree of this mixture.
Nowadays although, more of the upper classes go to AUC and private universities than
they do come to us, but still we do get students, mostly girls because the parents would
probably invest in their son to go to AUC but not with the girl. The girl would end up
studying English at Cairo University. So, you get these things, yes. And to me, it was very
clear, excuse me.
NP: Do you remember what we were saying? About the...
HK: Class.
NP: Students, yes. That you've got a lot of women who study in the English department.
HK: Yes. And you have these class varieties. So, right. Many women study and the
majority of our professors were women as well. So this is a very empowering
atmosphere I think for someone who is thinking of... gender issues and equality and so
on.
NP: How is the atmosphere of the English department in comparison to other
department and faculties on campus?
HK: In what sense?
NP: Do you think that it's more liberal? It's more... (Inaudible 0:05:36:7) I don't know.
HK: I think our department, I can talk of the faculty of arts because at faculty of arts, we
have over 10 departments. And I think we are considered one of the most (Inaudible
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0:05:57:8) in that sense that we have different classes, we have a majority of women.
But we also have the men who decide to come and study English also are interesting.
We have this class mixture which is not the case with many other departments whereby
they have mostly mid-class. And we are not like the French and German literature
departments which require being a graduate of a German school or a French school. So
this is again a different category, and I think we are sometimes seen as an elitist
department by other departments, but we are one of the biggest departments because
our junior colleagues do not teach in the department, but they teach language in all the
other departments where English is a requirement as a European language. So, yes, I
think... I think in that sense, our department is seen as... to me, it's very much of a
microcosm. And perhaps academically speaking, when it comes to scholarships, I think
among the more serious... right. Yes, in terms of scholarships, I think in our case, one of
the positive things about our department is that there is... in a way space for
communication being updated with what's going on internationally, and at the same
time, you have the privilege of being here, so you know, following what's going on, and I
think in the area of comparative studies for instance, our department is (Inaudible
0:08:25:4) so... I think we pride also in the fact that many artists and critics are
graduates of our department, so there is this space for a good scholarship as well.
NP: How did you first hear about women and memory forum?
HK: As I mentioned, Huda Sadda approached me when she was about to... together with
Umayma and Huda Lutfi and Sumayya Ramadan to establish the women and memory
forum, and the beginning was as a research group on a research project. She asked me
to join them. I had just done my master's, come back from Leeds, and she asked me to
join them as a research assistant. This was in 1995.
NP: And this was the first time that you'd heard of...
HK: Women and memory was not existent yet.
NP: Okay.
HK: We sat there and we came up with the name. So I was part of this meeting where
we sat and we were thinking of how to create a name for the project. At that time it was
a project and a group, and we were thinking of history, memory, gender, and we
decided it would be "women and memory forum", and we were thinking of whether to
have it as a centre but then we decided to have it as a forum, it's a meeting point, you
know, where researchers interested in women and memory in the wide sense would
come. That was the meeting that we were brainstorming for the name for this group.
So...
NP: Did you feel that women and memory was different from other initiatives at that
time concerning women's rights?
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HK: At that time, the tool that I was familiar with was the New Woman foundation,
because Shereen Abul Naga, our colleague was involved with the New Woman, so she
used to bring to the department flyers and things, so I was aware, but at that time, I
remember that to me, the New Woman stood ... to me as I say, from what she showed
us, to a place that was concerned with raising women's awareness about the
reproductive rights and violence. These were the two things that were... of course, later,
when I got to know the New Woman, it became much wider, but this was the first thing.
And then of course, through women and memory, through Huda, I got to know Nawla
and Amal and Hala Shukrallah and so on. The other place was the centre for Egyptian
Women's Legal Assistance (SEWLA). That was... I knew of it as a place where women can
go to seek legal assistance. And that was all I knew only of the existence, I didn't know
of the Arab Women's League as Huda Badran's initiative, but I knew that something
existed headed by Nawal Al-Sa'dawi, but I had no way to identify where it is or
whatever. So, to me, it was interesting. What was very interesting at that time for me
when Huda spoke of the idea of this research group was that I was beginning to develop
these interests personally as a beginning scholar trying to find her way, that this would
enable me to get access to knowledge produced about women, and in the future, to be
able to perhaps contribute to empowering people who were in my position, who
needed this kind of material, and particularly, since I was privileged enough to be able to
read in English, I was aware of all those colleagues of ours in the department of Arabic
for instance, sociology, and history who did not have access to English, they only read in
Arabic, and for whom feminism, gender, if you even spoke of the term had to be
explained because there were all those stereotypes... you know, media representations
and so on. So basically, to me it was a space, and it was something, kind of an extension
to what I'm doing at the university. I was thinking the university would be where I'd be
teaching, and this is where I would do my research.
NP: Why was the Women and Memory Forum set up outside the university instead of
an initiative within.
HK: Huda Sadda can tell you about it, but she told us because this was one of the things
that we were thinking of at a point related to one of the main issues when it comes to
women organizing, which is separatism or integration, whether you should exist on your
own or whether you should start, whether you should work from within another
institution. Women and Memory started as a project within a liberal organization; the
New Civil Forum, so they had this women's project because they were a liberal research
centre, mostly in the area of political and social research studies, they were... as liberals,
they wanted to have a women's project, and this is how Huda Sadda whom they knew
personally established... when we established Women and Memory as a research group,
were a project within the New Civil Forum. But if we're talking of the Women and
Memory Forum, it was only later on where this independent centre was established. It
wasn't established within the university because the university was not interested. It's
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as simple as that. So if you ask Mrs. Huda Sadda, she can tell you about it because she
approached university administration to have this kind of centre, research program
within academia rather than within the civil society. So it was basically there was no
choice.
NP: And haven't become part of civil society? Part of that emerging... there was a lot of
new organizations in the nineties that emerged, and facing particular challenging with
regards to relations with the government. How did you feel about that situation? Was it
something you thought about or was it something that was unexpected to have the
government (Inaudible 0:16:41:10) Women and Memory Forum on civil society?
HK: Yes. There was a direct point in the whole thing towards the end of the nineties, I
think 2000, 2002, I don't remember the date exactly, when the government simply said
that we are illegal and we had to reregister as a foundation, either as an association or
as a foundation. So it was very clear that there was a state threat, practically we had to
resolve the Women and Memory Forum and we had tore-establish ourselves under the
new law as a foundation. So there was this very concrete thing. But also, the second half
of the nineties, I represented Women and Memory in the so-called annual women's
organizations' committee whereby all of us co-organized women's day celebrations. So
we had contacts with all the other organizations. Solidarity action was part of our world,
and although at that time I wasn't directly connected with other human right
organizations, but I remember for instance when (Inaudible 0:18:22:0) went on strike
and I'm not sure whether I was on Women and Memory then or not yet. And I went to
show them support although nobody knew me. I went to their... later on I got to know
Aida Saif Al-Dawla, and Suzan Fayad and Magda Adli. They're great friends of mine. But
then I was very young, and to me, solidarity with those actions of the state was quite
obvious; attack on the civil society was a continuous part of our lives. And later on, I
remember we had difficulties for instance organizing this annual event because two or
three years later, nobody wanted us anymore, because they considered us too vocal,
too critical particularly when we would... one of the sessions that we had problems
organizing was... we had a theme every year, so when it was violence against women,
nobody would really care much, but I remember the one on political participation, then
we had difficulty having a place accept us. The so-called Mubarak Library who received
us for a number of years then the following year told us "it's not going to work" and
started giving us excuses and it became clear that they don't want us anymore. I
remember direct threats to someone like the New Woman who had a law case against
them, attempt to resolve them. Again I don't have a date in my mind but I remember
that we all... the act of solidarity was that all women's organizations representative
would go to the courthouse that day, and once they call the name of the New Woman,
we would all stand up, and this was an impressive day because you go to the
courthouse. I didn't know many of the people, I knew some of them of course. I went in
and it was packed. I sat down and then they called Nawla Darwish as the representative
11


of the New Woman, the whole... 200, 300 people whoever was there just stood up, not
only the lawyers who accompanied Nawla. Of course this was the first time I entered
the courthouse, so it was quite a disillusion because I see the court on television
whereby you have people seated nicely, you have the lawyer there, and you have a
judge there, and then you have the lawyer standing up in his place or her place and
defending. Here you would have, they're calling and then the lawyers were about 10
lawyers. Of course now I know them, Ahmad Saif Al-lslam and so on. Nabil Al-Hilali I
think is one. They all went with Nawla Darwish because they called Nawla Darwish up to
the lawyer and they were negotiating and all of us were standing there. So if this is the
kind of question that you were thinking of, these are forms of solidarity in addition of
course to petitions and... on a higher level, there are constantly at critical moments,
there were all these meetings about how to take action, who to consult, how to go
about it, whether to reregister as an association or as a foundation and so on and so
forth. Those years of working together, not perhaps that closely, with the other
women's organizations also I think had its very important outcome, which is, with the
beginning of the revolution, we did not take part, did not go out into the streets under
the women's banner. Each of us went on their own just as the majority of Egyptian
people, without being directed or mobilized in a concrete way. And then in February, we
were supposed to meet to start organizing our match event, annual event on women's
day. But of course when we met on February 15th or 16th, we decided that we had a
statement, and I think that the statements of the women's movement are worthy of
some consideration, maybe analysis at a later point since 2011. And we decided that we
should not be working now although we were as civil society organizations earlier, what
brought us together was everything that had to do with organizing and everything that
had to do with women's rights. We decided that we had to get involved as women's
organizations in the political scene because everything that's going to happen is going to
influence us as women, and at that meeting, we decided to... not at that meeting, on the
following meeting, we decided to act under one banner which is the coalition of feminist
organizations. And since then, much of our work has been represented under the
banner of the coalition of feminist organizations. To me of course, one of the more
important ideas that started as an initiative and then developed to something I think
much more serious was our engagement with the constitution, because in 2011 as early
as April 2011, Women and Memory perhaps because Amina and I... Amina is a colleague
at Women and Memory, Huda was away and Amina is my generation so we get to... and
Amina is a historian at AUC, and we thought that perhaps it's time, since they were
discussing all this, whether the constitution first or whatever first, that constitution will
eventually be a key issue. And in April 2011, we started our first meeting trying to create
a research group that would start reading the constitution, a study group for the
constitution. We were joined by Amani from Nadim centre, from (Inaudible 0:25:03:5)
Salma Al Naqqash and Yara who now is the IPR, Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights.
Dalia Abd Al-Hameed, the New Woman were not interested in the research group. And
12


we started working on the constitution. The Women and Memory group, we started
meeting on a weekly basis, reading constitutions, our constitution history plus looking at
Arab constitutions. We had a division of labor among us, and at the end we came up
with 14 demands that we thought would be necessary for the inclusion in the
constitution. And I think it was in June before the summer break, we had a meeting here
where we invited the women committees and all the political parties, we invited all the
organizations dealing with women's rights, everybody for a discussion of the outcome of
this thing. And it was adopted by the coalition in which you had groups such as (CEWLA)
Centre for Egyptian Women's Legal Assistance, and (ACT), Azza Kamel and Azza
Suleiman. Each of them through their connections and contact in the governorates had
a survey whereby I think there were 10 thousand women interviewed by (CEWLA) and
almost 10 thousand by (ACT) about their demands in the constitution. (Inaudible
0:26:44:2) a survey. At the same time, the New Woman was focusing on including
criteria. They engaged with the criteria of selecting members to the constitution
assembly, so the work was divided between us in a way not very strictly designed. We
did not say "we have to do this and this, you do this" but there was this kind of an
initiative. Women and Memory, because we were more into research, so we started
reading constitutions, we started comparing women's rights across our own
constitutional history, and coming up with what should be included in the new
constitution. The New Woman research centre who is more in touch with other
organizations who are more involved with political parties because many of them
became members in political parties, they took the line of mobilizing through including
the coalition of feminist organizations within what then called the "Constitution for All
Egyptians Front". That was trying to exercise pressure on the Islamists to include the
liberal and other voices within the process. So this is basically how my work within
Women and Memory has been actually lately much more focused towards activism than
scholarship which was my initial concern. But it's beyond our hands, this is a moment
where I think everybody should be in a way involved. And the positive thing is that we
produced one document in the name of the coalition of feminist organizations that was
based on the surveys plus our own demands that were revised through discussions and
meetings and so on. And then we sent them to the first constituent assembly and then
we sent them to the second constituent assembly, and then we went through the
parliament to submit a copy in March 2012. It was our way of celebrating women's day,
to go up to the parliament with the demands. And now we were lucky enough to have
people like Mouna Zulfaqar (Inaudible 0:29:28:1) in the committee, so they took our
demands, and we see them now in the constitution, so this is very rewarding I must say.
NP: So you're happy with the constitution?
HK: I' m happy with the rights and freedoms section in the constitution. And if I were to
vote today, I would still have to make up my mind, because I would want to say yes to
women's rights, to minority rights, to rights and liberties, all the rights and duties
13


section. I would want to say No to subjecting civilians to military courts. So there's yes
and there's no, and I wouldn't boycott, because I will not align myself with Islamists who
boycott or the Brotherhood basically who boycott. So I'm still (Inaudible 0:30:39:9) I
don't know. I will have to make up my mind on that day. I have to go and I have to cast a
vote, but I don't know what I'm going to do. Probably it's very similar to the situation of
choosing between
TAPE 3
HK: Shafiq and Morsi. I would probably end up going and saying what I think of the
whole thing. I did validate it by balloting that way, but at least I went.
NP: Can we go back to the period leading up to the 25th of January? You mentioned that
you were involved in 8th of March.
HK: 9th of March.
NP: Sorry, 9th of March.
HK: This is at the university.
NP: Could you say a bit more about the 9th of March group. What were its activities?
What was your role within the group?
HK: Right, the 9th of March, when it started 2003,1 was... okay, let's say that before the
9th of March, there were critical moments in the history of our university whereby there
would be a call for a demonstration on campus. Usually at a director's office, and I
would go, and there was a group of academic activists whose faces were familiar to me
because I used to see them, and then they started organizing. They knew each other
much earlier since the seventies mostly. This was a generation, Huda Sadda's
generation. Most of them knew themselves through the seventies. What brought them
together was the Intifada, the Iraq war, the war on Kuwait, alright? These issues... the
death of a student on campus in 1990 by tear gas. So I wasn't part of this circle, the
committee for defending national culture. She's not here but she's (Inaudible 0:02:06:9)
Amina Rasheed. So, I knew about these things through figures in our faculty of arts such
as Sayyed Al-Bahrawi who taught Arabic , fourth year, such as Amina Rasheed whom I
knew, saw her and knew her later on from the film about her "Four Women from
Egypt". There were a few of those figures, Huda Gindi, my supervisor at Cairo University
who has been very concerned with university issues. And I remember that we started
and one of the first meetings had to do with internal elections, where we had elections,
not of deans because at that point they were all appointed, but elections of what they
call faculty club. And I remember attending one of the earliest meetings in 2003 where I
14


was already becoming involved not in an organized way but through a friend of mine,
Aida Saif Al-Dawla. Kifaya was beginning to be formed and the first demonstrations
were taking place with the Israeli attack on Lebanon, they were mostly these kind of
things. Until I remember the first time Kamal Khalil started slogans against the Egyptian
regime. So there was this, and then you would see the same faces here and there. There
was a meeting at Cairo University. I remember Hani Al-Hussaini, our colleague from the
department of mathematics, presenting the idea of the date that we should organize
ourselves into a group whose focus would be... yes, because this was the time when
security started annoying academics because of political involvement. So whereby we
should be working on campuses and we should be focusing not on international issues
as much as on our own academic freedoms. No to security interference on our... on the
campus and so on and so forth. And I remember the day when he even suggested the
date. It was 2003 I think, and he explained the significance of the date 9 March. Ahmad
Lutfi Sayyed, I didn't know the story... he resigned because the ministry interfered and
they kicked Taha Hussein from university, they stopped him from working because of his
book, and this is where Ahmad Lutfi Sayyed, director of university, the president,
resigned as a way of exercising pressure on the government. So they had to go back and
Taha Hussein returned. So he suggested the date and this is how it started. And then my
role, when we started I was among the younger generation, so what we have is we have
a monthly meeting that we have until today, first Wednesday of every month then I
don't remember what day of the month it was. We would either be responding to things
happening, either documenting security interferences and so on and so forth. So the
beginning was with the idea of having an annual conference celebration, and this is how
I got involved with many technical details. Working on collecting material from senior
members of the group who had concrete examples of either security interferences and
preventing them from travelling to conferences, documenting all these kinds of what we
considered unlawful and unacceptable. And then of course solidarity trying to create a
file exposing what was going on, corruption and so on and so forth, and of course
indirectly, we played a role because I was among 2 or 3 in the faculty in the department
of English. I would be talking about it, alerting people to these kinds of things. When
there was a form of protest whether it's a march and so on, I would be informing. And
then gradually of course we started being a source of support for students in a way that
students needing support from academics, knowing that we are not connected with the
administration, that we would be on their side. So working with students, not
approaching them as much as having this open space for them to approach us. In my
case for instance, during university student elections, some of those students would
come and ask me whether I could give 10 minutes for them to introduce their program
to the students before my class or at the end of my class. You know, providing the space
that would otherwise not be. So this was before the revolution. Constant stands. I
remember call for strike because there were two directions; one direction had to do
with changing the law in a way to reintroduce elections on campus. So I was among the
15


people who worked on the revision of the university law, and there was the other group
who was more focused on restructuring the salaries, because our salaries at that point
were very, and still continue to be very low. So, basically these were the areas where we
worked, and within this we had a small group within the English department in the
faculty of arts again, working on the law, suggesting amendments and so on and so
forth. And this is why February 2011, it was before the revolution when the university
was open. We managed to organize as 9th of March, there were members within our
movement who strategically coordinated with "University Staff for Reform", the
Brotherhood on campuses, and jointly, one of things that were organized jointly was a
conference, a meeting attended by over 5 thousand faculty members. February, I don't
remember the date, 11th... no, not 11th, because this was when Mubarak stepped down
immediately following that, because during the 18 days, we coordinated marches; a
march from in front of the university, another march from... so there were 2 massive
marches that were organized by 9th of March with "University Staff for Reform". One
was on a Tuesday and one was on a Friday. I don't remember now the dates. I think it
was the 7th of February and the other one was the day that Mubarak stepped down,
because we marched, workers marched, and everybody marched to Tahrir the Friday, I
think it was the 11th of February. So this is the kind of thing that went on. In addition,
within the movement, we don't have structures, we don't have concrete structures
within the movement, within 9 March I mean. But there are a few people in the faculty
of arts, Madiha Doos, Amina Rasheed, Sayyed Al-Bahrawi, myself, are the more
involved, and then there are others who are less involved. What we did and this has not
been written, there's this history that needs to be written, was because one of our
concerns at 9 March was reintroducing elections. So following this mega conference
that was organized then at the beginning of February as I said, it was very funny because
then, the idea was that this was the revolution of the young people, the young
generation. So to avoid of course the clash of egos as I would call it among the
University Staff for Reform and 9 March who would sit on the podium that day, they
decided that they would ask the juniors to sit there, and in a way organize the whole
discussion. So I was there to represent 9 March and a colleague of mine, Ahmad Abd Al-
Maqsoud, was there to represent the | Brotherhood. And we were on the panel and of
course the 5 thousand people when they saw us, most of them professors, they said
"what are those kids doing here? We want Abul Ghar and Abdul Galeel Mustafa". We
were sitting down there and people came shouting at us "how dare you sideline your
professors and occupy the stage?" it was a very... so Abul Ghar and Abdul Galeel had to
go up and say "we want the new generation..." but anyway, what was good about that
day was that there was a document produced at the end of the day in which we vowed
as faculty to democratize the process on campus and our agenda was... if I remember,
the documents are there but it's now memory. One as to start working again on the new
law to reintroduce elections, the other one was the salary schedule, and number 3 was
to work on trying to identify and offer all possible leader support, etc, to those who
16


have been detained during the revolution. And based on this, we went back to faculty of
arts and because our dean was supposed to end his term in July, we refused to accept
someone being appointed and we found that this would be a very good opportunity for
us to start the process of elections without giving the impression of toppling him down,
you know it's not another replica of Mubarak where you remove him and you bring
someone elected, but his term ends so that the new one would be elected rather than
appointed. And we managed to mobilize the faculty of arts, a wonderful experience
actually whereby we organized elections; we created our own laws through meetings.
The process of elections, the criteria for those running for elections, and a whole
process went whereby we ended up... Randa Abu Bakr which was amazing. She was a
young professor, she is a young professor, one of the youngest professors in the faculty
of arts, a woman being selected by the majority to be the new... of course this did not
happen, she did not become dean of our faculty. But because this was so serious and
the government felt things were running out of its hands, they had to introduce
regulations for elections. A process in which again we 9 March were involved in by
meeting parliamentarians, presenting... I attended one of those meetings with the
Egyptian Social Democratic party, Ayman Abul Ela, introducing our own vision
concerning the process of elections, and this is why the democratic process actually
started on universities, on campuses. So now we have not only... we have elected deans,
we have elected presidents, we have elected deans, and we have elected heads of
departments, which is something that never happened before because when it comes
to deans, heads of departments, they are elected directly not by representational...
what do you call it? You do not elect a body that does the selection for you but it's
direct elections, whereas with director, we elect our electoral college, our
representatives would then elect the dean. And for the first time, because up till the
early nineties, deans were elected, only deans were elected but they were elected by
professors only. In this case all are represented even junior assistants are represented in
the process. So, to me, this is a revolution on campus that has not been documented or
written about. I gave a presentation at the university college union in London a couple
of years ago. They invited me through friends who were active at the UCU, but it hasn't
been written about. So yea, if you ask me, my priorities... I constantly need to shift my
priorities between things that need to be done at university level and things that need
to be done at the feminist, women's organizations' level. With the constitution process,
we did also as 9March, we did a discussion of our rights that we would like to see in the
constitution, and we held a conference July 20011 think at Ain Shams University. And
since we had already started working with women's rights, I was asked by my colleagues
to introduce this experience to our colleagues in 9 March, the way in which we came up
with those demands, and at the same time, this was kind of a workshop in which we as
academics would come up with our own demands based on our historical documents,
you know, higher educational rights in our constitutions, and would come up with one
document that we would submit in the name of 9 March to the constituent assembly.
17


So that's basically it. Recently, 9 March, we are of course concerned with academic
freedoms on campuses. The case that was won raised by 9 March represented by Abd
Al-Galeel Mustafa in 2010, we got the rights to kick out security. We're talking here
about state security, from campuses. And this never happened until after the revolution
where they had to leave and although this is a part that I'm not involved in, Hani
Hussaini is more involved in the process of training the administrative security body on
campuses to deal with our safety and security on campuses. So this is an area that we
are now concerned with, we had the latest statements had to do with what happened in
front of Cairo University that ended up with killing a student in the faculty of
engineering with attempts at occupying campuses which never happened with Cairo
University so far. Yesterday things went smoothly as well luckily unlike what's going on
in Al-Azhar. And I think one of the main reasons with Al-Azhar is apart from the fact that
they have a majority of the student body and the faculty body is in a way from the
Brotherhood or as we say Brotherhood lovers or supporters, but the problem with Al-
Azhar is that they have their own law, and their leadership is not elected, they're still
appointed by the state. And this creates grievances of course among students. With our
students, they know that Jaber Nassar is elected, that all the deans have been elected,
that the communication and interaction... we have a long history of movements such as
9 March protecting students on campuses, so I think, I personally do not see us falling
into this generalization of students burning up universities because you have to have
this clear distinction between the history of each and every institution. Even Ain Shams
and Cairo are different because Ain Shams had their last president before the
revolution, had organized gangs on campus who would not only bully and beat up
opposition students on campus, but even professors. So Abd Al-Galeel Mustafa, Radwa
Ashour, Madiha Doos I think was there. I didn't go. In December, November or
December 2010 immediately before the revolution, they were beaten by thugs at Ain
Shams University because the administration used those thugs against students as well
as any forms of opposition on campus. So the history of each and every university is
different, and this is why our expectation of what could happen at different universities
is different. We know that Ain Shams has this history of thuggery that could possibly be
even currently out of the university president's control. They could be working for
whichever parties. We know Cairo University has this history of the reform of the
security, the administrative security started even before the revolution. Once the
lawsuit was won, Hussam Kamel took the whole things seriously then. And this was of
course intensified with the revolution when things were clear that we would not accept
to go back to what used to be going on. But the threats are there of course. It's not all
rosy.
NP: Have the political situation and the 30th of June impacted upon either activism with
the 9th of March or with Women and Memory Forum?
18


HK: This is an important question. Within... let me start with 9 March because it's
clearer, it's much more obvious. 9 March was a movement that was open and our way
of communication was an open... not an open but a closed e-mail group. But anybody
who was an academic in any university could join, right? So the communication was
open, and also if somebody came up with a statement, with an idea, with a (Inaudible
0:23:14:10) meeting and so on and so forth. And the space there... we had even
Brotherhood people in this group. You have all sorts of people representing different
ideologies; Nasserists, Marxists, liberals and so on, all of these are part of this large
group 9 March. And therefore, what unites us is academic freedoms and autonomy, our
own space, no to security. However, following 30th of June, it is a fact that there were
people within the group who became pro-Brotherhood very vocally although they did
not earlier seem to be pro-Brotherhood. And there are those within the same group
who are supporting Sisi. They want the security to go and put an end to the violence and
so on. And therefore, it is a very tricky space because when you issue a statement, it has
to be representative of all of us. And therefore, focusing on... we all agree on
condemning the ministry of interior. Nobody can't... the different maybe could be
between those like myself who do not want to see the police even near the university
and those who believe that they should not enter and be inside but they could be
stationed outside. This is the kind of discussion that could be going on among us. And of
course, there isn't anything concrete that I could tell you but this is the kind of
discussion that could be going within the group. And what we try to do is constantly to
focus on the thing that unites us all. With Women and Memory Forum, it's slightly
different because if you're thinking even of Women and Memory Forum, you will think
of Huda Sadda who jokingly talks of herself as being part of the new regime, "I am the
authority". You have Umayma Abu Bakr who was a member of Al-Wasat party who
belongs to those who are now being... not herself but her political circles are those who
are now in prison. And there's someone like me who is neither this nor that, who's
critical of this and that, and who perhaps does not align herself with anything concrete
currently on the scene. So if we're talking about Women and Memory, we cannot speak
of having one position, and this is for instance why, when we were talking, although the
constitution has been our initiative within the women's organizations, but we decided
that we are going to... first of all, we stopped leading the constitution process ever since
Huda got into the committee because we decided we're not going to even appear as
though we are propagating Huda Sadda's stand within the thing, so we decided from
that moment we were follower. The major initiative was (Inaudible 0:26:54:1) whereby
they were organizing a number of meetings in the governorates with young women's
initiatives in Mansoura, Asyut, Souhag, Aswan, and Alexandria. And the idea was to use
the interest in the constitution to raise women's rights as a... and our clear position was
that we are going to be part of this as long as we're talking about women's rights in the
constitution, not about vote "yes" or "no" or whatever. We're not getting into the area
of mobilizing for. So this was our stand as Women and Memory concerning... and this is
19


a change in our way of work towards the constitution that is part of what happened on
the 30th of June. Again, if you ask us, many people would make a clear statement "let's
vote yes for the constitution". We decided that we're not, because within our Women
and Memory, Huda would say yes, Umayma would say no. as I said I'm still unclear,
right? If we're talking about our staff, you would find the same thing there, so we're not
mobilizing towards one thing. We do not... however, our focus continue to be women's
demands, women's rights. We all agree that women's rights that are included in the
constitution are great. We are conscious that if and probably the constitution will get a
yes, our work will start the following stage. This is not the end, this only a beginning
where we'll start looking at how to change the laws to provide women with more rights
in the light of what's in the constitution. Does this answer your question? And mind you,
I think if we're talking yes, we're talking about Women and Memory, we're talking about
the board that includes Huda Sadda, Umayma Abu Bakr, Sahar Subhi. We have not even
discussed whether it's a yes or no. I do not belong to the board but I'm a founding
member and I'm more closely involved with the administration of the place. With the
staff, we haven't even discussed whether it's a yes or a no or whatever, although we
have taken part in the discussions around what rights we are calling for and demanding
and what has been included in the constitution. Does this answer your question?
NP: Yeah. Apart from the political process, are you involved in any other initiatives or
activities, for example through Women and Memory that are dealing with the cultural
aspects of these political changes that are happening? For example, looking at women's
representations in the media. Are you doing anything like that?
HK: We're not doing thing, but one of the projects and perhaps you'd want to meet
Maysan our colleague who is the program's manager, and she's working on it with Huda
Sadda. One of the most important... actually this is how Women and Memory in many
ways started with the idea of documenting women's lives, the archive of women's
voices, and before the revolution... I'm glad that you raised this because I would have
missed it completely.
TAPE 4
HK: Until the revolution, the focus was on recording the life stories of women over 70
who lived at a time in which they were in many ways among the first generation of
women carving their own space in the public sphere. And there were those political
activists. Mostly Lamees worked on the communist activists. There were the artists
Nadia Lutfi, Hind Rustom. There were the educators, the teachers. So this was the kind
of area that Women and Memory was focused on, but since the revolution, we decided
to document the revolution stories of young women and we now have life stories... not
20


life stories as much as stories of young women activists involved in the revolution. And I
think there are several categories. Maysan is more in control of this or aware of all the
details. We got some help with Nadine Nabigh whom you might know. Nadine Nabigh
was here for a year, and during that year, she helped us develop, it was her idea
actually, to develop a timeline of women's activism since the revolution with the help of
Dana and another colleague of ours, collecting everything written about women,
everything documenting women's participation in the revolution. So we have this
project plus we have the project of women's stories of the revolution, and the stories
include feminist activists from different categories; there are women who have been
part of... who had been somehow either politically active as political activists or as
feminist activists before the revolution. There's another category of those young women
who came into this with the revolution and so on and so forth. So this is a new direction
in feminism, and this is a project that is still in the process of developing. We don't have
anything yet, material that has come out of it. But this is an area that is being developed
as part of Women and Memory documentation.
NP: Is there anything I haven't asked you about that you want to add?
HK: There isn't anything that I particularly... I didn't come prepared. Maybe this is a good
thing for you, I don't know. But perhaps yes. You didn't ask the question that we're
usually very often asked about whether I can personally see a generational shift in
interest personality. I keep commenting to my colleagues that until recently, I was the
junior member of Women and Memory. Amina Al-Bindari and myself were considered
the young generation, and Women and Memory as a whole was seen as one of the
younger groups. A position that was shaken by Nazra. We always laugh because Nazra,
they have their 20s, 30s as their age group founders, members, and staff whereas in our
case, until recently before we had the group of young researchers joining us in the past
two years, basically we were the 30s, 40s, and 50s. this was the kind of thing. What I can
tell is for instance that with the generations, Women and Memory works very well with
Nazra, and for a while I was worried that perhaps it has to do with the fact that we are
the academics, we are older, so perhaps they... I was wondering to what extent are they
giving us more space. Are we recreating a patriarchal structure there? This was a
question. And a question that was raised by me particularly very straightforwardly
during those trips to the governorates because I was the oldest of the group and I was
the only PhD holder. And some of those, Salma Al-Naqqash and Aya, they were my
students one day at Cairo University, so I was just concerned about the politics within.
To what extent are they aware of the existence of such a power kind of thing? And I was
very pleased. Perhaps you can develop this further or maybe Salma will present a
different perspective, but I was informed very gladly that the younger generation of
feminists and activists including Nazra and their circles to which they bring us, that they
find Women and Memory as one of the very few organizations that are not patronizing
them. So this is something that is very important because we are very conscious of it.
21


We are very cautious internally not to have this typical (Inaudible 0:06:35:6) structure
within Women and Memory, and with the very close work with Nazra recently during
the past couple of years particularly having Salma Al-Naqqash was leading the project,
being my former student one day. I was raising those questions: to what extent is there
an underlying... and perhaps this is an area that hasn't been explored, and I'm too
closely involved to be able to, you know. If I say or write about what I'm telling you now,
it might seem like self-glorification, whatever. But I think this is an area that should be
explored by someone who's outside to see the... because as you know, with the
revolution, there's this sense among the young people of empowerment of the young
people, particularly Egyptian young people who are raised within what you can say a
patriarchal structure, not only in terms of gender but in many ways. So I would be very
interested to read someone's analysis of this generational kind of... how you see this
generational interaction that is important so that we do not end up reproducing those
structures, you know? I don't know if I'm making myself clear.
NP: Yeah, I think this is very interesting. Did you ever feel when you were...
HK: Yes, exactly, this is the point. I was very conscious of them being my seniors, of
Huda, Umayma, Huda Lutfi. I was very conscious of this, and at the same time I was
conscious of Huda's efforts and Umayma's efforts not to reproduce this with me in
particular, perhaps because I was more closely involved with the work. But definitely I
ended up doing many of the things that I was doing simply because I was the younger.
And at that time probably because I was not marries, I did not have a family, so I would
have more time. And probably now I'm very maybe conscious so as not to fall into such
a trap particularly since I have a son and I realize that sometimes I might be asking
Maysan to do certain things for me simply because I can't physically do them. I can't go
to a meeting at 4 pm. I cannot be in a meeting so I send her and I make the point that
whenever there are meeting outside of Women and Memory, that Maysan is there. And
lately even Aya is there, so that the impression is not that I go with my secretary. We
have been trying to do this and as I told you, Women and Memory delegated me very
early on to represent them with the women's organizations, probably because most of
the meetings were in the evening where Huda's kids were still young and Umayma's
boys were still young, you know what I'm talking about. And the same thing is now with
me and I'm very conscious with Maysan and Aya, with the younger generation. To what
extent am I asking them to attend certain meeting at 3 pm simply because I have to be
at home waiting for my son coming back from school? And to what extent is this
undermining... you know what I mean. Am I undermining anything? It is difficult, the
generational part and particularly with the idea of the fact that in my case, I have
domestic responsibilities that are probably as demanding as my work and what I want to
do, whereas I look with a degree of envy at Maysan who does not still have this in her
life, and I'm just very careful about the way in which Maysan, when she represents
Women and Memory, that she's not seen as substituting me but as being a decision
22


maker. And this is something that we try to make very clear that when you go, you're
not there taking notes and then telling people "I have to ask Hala or Huda", but we can
discuss things and this is the minimum that we can take decisions on the spot. This is a
way of dealing with a situation, of empowering young people. But to me, this is a
question that you didn't raise, and I think perhaps this is a very personal concern to me
because as I said, I've been in the organization ever since I was very young, and I was
prepared. We did not have money to be able to send invitations. I used to go from home
to home to leave the invitations to events with people. I used to do the things that now
we pay a courier to do. But I wonder also to what extent is there is this generational
burden, and whether this could be happening unconsciously. Right, yeah. Talk to
Maysan I think. Maysan maybe, I don't know. Because you're interested in activism,
right? I don't know whether you're interested, I don't know if your research, whether
you want to
[the recording ends here]
23

Interview with Hala Kamal
2013

TAPE 1

Nicola Pratt: Can you tell me when and where you were born?
Hala Kamel: Right, it's rather… it's the first time I'm asked this question in an interview. I was born in Kuwait because my father is Egyptian and my mother is Polish. They had met in Poland in the fifties and then when my father was studying and my mother was studying in France, she came to Egypt and they got married in 67 when the war with Israel… she was here. And they decided to get married, and at that time, my father was working at the ministry of culture, and he was working in Kuwait, he was the generation of Egyptians of the sixties whom Nassir sent to work in other Arab countries as part of the pan-Arab project. So my father was a folklorist and he was there to establish the centre for folklore studies in Kuwait. And I was born on the 11th of July 1968, one of the first children to be born in the Kuwait hospital. So I had my first years of education in Kuwait. First in a private school and then when Kuwait started developing, I was moved to a national public school because the state started investing in education. And I finished my high school in Egypt; we came after Sadat's peace with Israel. Of course in the Arab countries, Egyptians were being subjected to different kinds of unpleasant situations, and therefore, my father who was patriotic, who did not choose to keep silent about his position in support of his government decided that he would not be able to work in such circumstances. So, we came back and it was already the plan that I would come here to study at university. There were no plans to stay on forever in Kuwait anyway. So I came and did my high school degree and then I got to Cairo University. I wanted to study English literature. I wanted to become a literary critic, so this was my initial… a journalist basically. I studies at Cairo University for 4 years, I think very important and formative years, they supported all the things that we were being taught at home, the idea of multi-cultures and the idea of tolerance, the wide view of the world and so on. And this is something that I think I was very lucky to have reinforced during these important years at university, in addition to my closer engagement with the Egyptian society, this being not a private elitist kind of place but more of an institution where you can find the average Egyptians represented widely. At that time, I was already interested in reading Nawal Al-Sa'dawi, Latifa Al-Zayat, it was quite a figure to me. And at home, we had loads of books, so it was to me a natural thing to read a lot. I was very lucky because I came top of my class in the last year, in the last two years of my studies. I was second on my class in the first year and the second year, and then third year of my studies and fourth year… so this in Egyptian universities gives you the possibility of becoming appointed at the university as a junior assistant and continue an academic career. Since my father was an academic and my mother was considered by many people, not talking about myself, as an intellectual in many ways. So it was quite a privilege for me to end up in this line and start this kind of a career. I was also lucky because I started working on my master's. I was interested in representations of women, we're talking year 1990 when I graduated. Already my fourth year project in what we called an honor subject because some students could choose additional courses and I wrote a paper I remember on representations of women in Thomas Moor's "Utopia". So, there was something there; there was this interest there, probably because of the reading that I had access to, women's writings; May Zyada, Latifa Al-Zayat, and so on. So, for my master's, I felt much closer reading women's writings than men's writings. I read a lot as I said, but I felt some kind of closer affinity, and I decided for my master's to do… it just happened that I attended summer school. I got a scholarship from the British Council. I attended a summer school in 1992 in Scotland, Edinburgh for a month and a half. Yes, it was six weeks. So I had a proper library, and this is where I came across Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, an Indian of origin, German family background, who married an Indian and lived in India, lived in England, lived in the States. So for me, this was perhaps something that also would shed light on my own identity, this mixture and moving between cultures, religions, and so on. And I was fascinated by her work at that time, and I chose her for my master's topic. When I came back from the summer school, the British Council announced an MA scholarship so I applied. I went to Leeds where I did my master's on cross-culture encounters in the works of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. When I came back in 1995, of course I was promoted to assistant lecturer, this is how you move on within a national university in Egypt. You become a junior assistant upon your first degree, when you're one of the top students, and then once you do your master's you become assistant lecturer, and then you become lecturer which is the equivalent of assistant professor in the American system, and then you become associate professor based on you research, a professor and so on. So I came back and it was 1995 when Huda Sadda was thinking of the women and memory forum, and it was Huda Sadda, Umayma Abu Bakr, plus Sumayya Ramadan, an artist writer with whose work I was just beginning to get familiar with because she had just published a collection of short stories, and Huda Lutfi, an artist. Again, she was having… she was an academic, a historian at AUC, and at that time, she was having her first art gallery, not gallery, exhibition. And so they were the founders of the women and memory research group. And Huda Sadda approached me to be the research assistant, so this is how I started working. Of course, before that, I had translated a number of short stories by Indian writers into Arabic, so this was kind of my interest, and I was still beginning to think of what I would like to do next with my PhD. It took me a little longer than normal in many ways because I did not move from one step to the other immediately. I think I put some effort in the establishment of women and memory, helping with the establishment of women and memory, and then in 1997, we became an independent entity, not a research group, not the women and memory forum. And at that time, I was beginning to realize that I would like to do work less on fiction but more on personal narratives. And I started developing a special interest in autobiographies. So, I decided to so my PhD on immigrant women's writing in the United States. Particularly, I chose 4 writers, academics: Elmaz Abinader, Lebanese, art performer, third generation Lebanese writer "Children of the Roojme" and I chose an Armenian American. It's about her grandma's journey from Armenia, the genocide and all this, the history and this baggage. So these were the two writers who were academics and at the same time third generation. I chose 2 other writers who were themselves immigrants who decided to stay. Leila Ahmad who had just published her autobiography "A Border Passage", and Chinese Shirley Lim who was a theorist academic focusing on ethnic women's writing. I started working on this and then I got a chance to… I have an uncle who lives in the States, so I went to collect material because here of course the situation is miserable concerning if you wanted to see this research. So I went, I spent 3 months in the summer with my uncle and aunt who both taught at Smith College in North Hampton, Massachusetts, a women's college. And since the academic starts here a little later, we used to begin first of October, while there they start first of September, I had September and I asked whether I could audit some classes. I was fascinated with the idea of a women's college, the women's archives, the Smith archive and the women studies courses because this was something completely new to me. And Suzan (Inaudible 0:11:44:3) who was the chair of the women studies department or program. It was the women studies program. This was 1999, 1998, sorry the summer of 1998. I attended a month and then she together with professor Pissarose of the American diploma, it's a graduate diploma, they told me that there's a possibility for international students. It's a very expensive college, so there would have been no possibility for me to study there on my own. And they told me that they have a scholarship for international students to come and do a one year diploma in American studies, but I said I'm not particularly interested in American studies as a discipline, and they told me that the good thing about this program is that you have people doing political science you have people doing media studies, you have people doing education, everything. What you do is you start doing… the program is a one academic year program whereby you have one course per term. It's a seminar on women in American studies, American history, and then you can choose whichever courses you want, three per term, and write a baby thesis as they call it. So what I did was I applied and I got accepted so I spent the academic year of 1999-2000, I graduated… and then I wrote my baby thesis. I had asked my supervisor, Cairo University professor Huda Al-Hindi whether I could use some of the work that I had started doing here for my PhD at Cairo University because I had registered for my degree at Cairo University, whether I could use it there doing papers, whether this was possible. I wasn't sure whether this was ethically okay. She told me it was fine as long as I didn't publish anything because then… now it's different but then your PhD had to be completely new in the sense that it should not be published or have any parts of it published. So I said I'm not publishing, it's going to be just so that I use this here in a way to feed into my work. And there I asked my supervising professor Suzan Vandein whether I could be doing my baby thesis on something that is connected to my PhD, and she told me "fine". So, I did a part that helped me develop the theoretical bit of my PhD on theorizing the personal. And I looked at 2 texts at that point, not before. So this is basically… I came back in 2000 and then I got very much involved with women and memory. I think this was because women and memory gives you exposure to other areas of research, but at the same time, I think to me, women and memory is my window to activism because it is the way through which I manage to get in touch with the Egyptian feminist movement, something about which I used to read but was not part of. So this is basically… does this answer your question?
NP: Yeah. May I ask some details? Some things? Okay. How was it growing up in Egypt? Well, Kuwait then Egypt? And with mixed parentage?
HK: In Kuwait, it was because we were foreigners, so for me, the identity was that we were not Kuwaitis. This awareness of this mixture I didn't become conscious of it until a little later, mostly when I came back to Egypt, because this is where it became clear that we are not foreigners but Egypt and Poland are part of our identity. In Kuwait, because Kuwaitis were a very closed community and mostly our circles were Egyptian families and even more so Arab Polish families. Because mothers are usually the ones who create those networks of social life. So basically I grew up… the friends that I have till today are Arab-Polish, Lebanese and Polish Palestinian, Jordanian with whom I keep in touch until today, I mean because they ended up in Poland for different political reasons of course as we can imagine. So for me, I wasn't... we were 3 girls, 3 sisters, so at home, we did not experience any kind of discrimination on the base of gender. And at the same time, we were raised in a family where my mother was Polish, she spoke to us in Polish. My father was Egyptian, he spoke to us in Egyptian. That was not Kuwaiti, that was not Palestinian because most of the teachers at school were Palestinian. So as I said, we were part of… I would say even perhaps the Polish identity was stronger than the Egyptian, because we were not part of the Egyptian community as much as we were part of the Polish versus… outside, inside. You know the house and within the home and outside. I have very fond memories of my childhood in Kuwait because we lived… there was the beaches and the sea. So in the summer, every weekend, we were setting up a tent at the beach and spending the whole day there, and you just cross the street, and in the winter, we would have the desert. We would drive for about half an hour and be in the middle of the desert, again with a tent with friends, and… so basically this. At home as I said we had both languages moving on. My parents… my father understood Polish because of the year he spent in Poland, but he never practiced, he never used the language. My mother had studied Arabic, she had originally done her… when they married, she stopped at the point when she was about to finish her PhD on representation of the Egyptian society in early 20th century fiction. So she knew the language, she could lead fluently. Of course her spoken was, as you can imagine, heavily accented. There were both religions at home because my mother was a Roman Catholic and mu father Muslim. Probably my mother because of her attempt at asserting her identity, she was more of a practicing Catholic than my father was a practicing Muslim. We had Islam in school because automatically, you know, according to the father. So the father is Muslim, your documents… (Inaudible 0:19:25:4) but because my father was a folklore scholar and my mother was in many ways culturally very interested in this combination of her background, combination of literature and sociology because this was her area. So the discussions at home were very interesting in that sense. I don't think I was at any point conscious of being in any way different. As my mother used to say, we're not half-half, we are one plus one. Perhaps this gave me and my sisters a sense of privilege, in Egypt, it was slightly different because you came in a society where you have Copts. In Kuwait, there were no Copts. Throughout my life, I had the… the surprise was to realize that one of my class mates in primary school, I remember her, I remember the way she looks but I don't remember her name, that she was Christian. And to me this was strange because in Kuwait you had no Christians. Christians were basically foreigners. When we came to Egypt it was different; you had Christians in your class room. It was part of culture. On TV you had Christmas Eve mass with Pope Shnouda showing up. So the issue of religion was not… at home, we never had this issue, we celebrated all Christian feasts and they were family celebrations. We had all the Muslim feasts, my mother even used to do things that were not very common among other Egyptian families, probably the folklore dimension my father's… rice pudding for instance on Prophet Mohammad's Mawlid. So certain things that were probably more cultural than religious I think. And my first interaction with in a way the Muslim society, I remember was at university, because this is where you had a room where girls would pray during prayer time. For the first time they had lessons, so Hiba Ra'ouf who's now a big name in Islamic studies was then a junior assistant at the faculty of political science. She used to come to the faculty of arts to the girls' prayer room and give religious lectures. I attended one or two and I think we clashed. I remember that I… not a clash as much as I was a little inquisitive and then I was seen as being disruptive. I don't know whether she remembers it. We see each other and we meet of course, but of course I remember because I was a student and she was you know, this junior assistant at the faculty of political science. But if you'd like to know about my… in my case, I do not define myself as religious at all. I have read in religious and around religions. I have… Buddhism, Hinduism, it was something that was intriguing to me because I was raised in this setup and I felt at a point that I needed to make a conscious choice rather than just follow, and then follow whom and what? Because my mother used to go to churches and we used to go with her, so I know many of the prayers. So, I think that for me, it was more like choosing the… looking at the similarities rather than the differences. And this is what strikes me as a method of analysis, that people usually try to look at differences in critical approaches even to a literary text. So students used to focus on what marks this as different from… and to me, I catch myself up till today when I'm teaching a course like comparative literature for instance for undergraduate students, that I'm more focused on similarities. I'm less concerned with differences. This is something that consciously has to be revised and I think my feminist dimension is in a way highlighting this to me, that difference is an important thing. So, I do not practice wither this or that, but I'm familiar with both quite well I'd say.
NP: It's interesting that you've spoken about the religious aspect of identity. Is this what… when you came to Egypt after Kuwait, is this the aspect of identity that was most though about or…
HK: It wasn't at school when I came to school. It was at university. And of course now when you look, in retrospect, these were the late eighties, early nineties. This is where the Islamic movement was given freehand at the expense of the socialists and Marxists. And of course, I quickly switched because I had my stages. As I said, I used to attend even those classes given by... it took me a term, not a whole year, second year I remember. This was the year… no problem… that has to do with university not with the Egyptian society. And this was of course, to me because this was all new. I wasn't sure what this is all about, but then I got into the Marxist circles at university. So, you know, I did readings here and there, but to me, this was a very clear thing. Now when people speak of Mubarak's giving space for Islamists, I can remember that from my undergraduate years of course. And then later on, I got involved with the March 9th movement from the autonomy of universities and independence, academic freedoms. It's a campus opposition movement. I was one of the founders in 2003- 2004. So to me, I'm aware of all the politics, but I don't… this wasn't something that to me was a mark of the Egyptian society as much of Cairo University. We had students, I remember our colleagues during elections coming … we would have class at 12 knowing that usually professors come in 15 minutes later than the time because they give us time to move from one place to the other, from one classroom to the other. And within these 15 minutes, they would come and lecture us religion, and you know giving us different brochures and things. So they were a very visible presence on campus at the same time when people who later one… we would see that there were other students who would put up what we call wall papers, wall press, and then it gets torn off and then later on, I know that this is Lamees who was a Marxist when I was a first year student, and I'd see those clashes between… and they were empowered. So this is all part of the whole thing, part of university which at the end is microcosm although I didn't see that within my family and my closer friends. But it was quite clear on campus, and perhaps one of the indicators is that when we were in first year, we were a group of 40 in our section, and we had only one veiled colleague. By the time we were in fourth year, they had not only doubled but perhaps triples, the number of veiled girls. So there was this very obvious action where universities became the ground for Islamist… I don't know what you can call it, propaganda, whatever.
NP: You mentioned that you sort of joined Marxist circles. First of all, what was the opportunity for that? How easy was it? And also what sort of activities were Marxist students involved in?
HK: Right. Of course this is long history. But unlike Islamist students and they had their stuff hanging everywhere; the Marxists had a little point at the entrance to the main library. This was a kind of a get together, and through friends of friends of friends of friends, because I used to go in and out, so they used to stand there and discuss things, so I'd meet a friend and they the discussion would move on to a certain point. And then because at that time I was interested in theatres, attending plays connected to my studies in a way, but also a little wider because my parents used to go to art galleries and the opera since we were children. So I was becoming more interested in independent… that is now known as the generation of the nineties or my generation who started independent theatre, who started independent publishing and so on. And you would meet those people who you'd see at the steps of the main library in front of the faculty of arts, our department, you would see then in whatever and then you would go and sit at a café and discuss and so on. At that time of course, 1990, there was the… later on, the war, Kuwait- Iraq, and you had the demonstrations. I think the first demonstration I walked in was again a Nasserist. I didn't realize it was a Nasserist demonstration when I was an undergraduate. I went with a friend, they were

TAPE 2

HK: marching across the… and then they started chanting something about Nasser, I don't know what, and I decided I'm leaving, and my friend decided that he's leaving too because we were not at that point for Nasser as a person. We liked the chants about social justice, about students' rights and so on, but once they started glorifying a figure, I remember that me and my friend just… at the same time, more or less, just left. So this was basically… if you're asking me, I was never involved politically in a group on campus, so I would not be able to help you with that, but it's just things that I saw. And I said the Marxists to me.. It was these intellectual kind of discussions by well read people rather than those coming and lecturing you, trying to take the 15 minutes. You know the whole thing, if you think ethically, which is something that we read about, ethics as a philosophy, as students you find that this is ethical and this is unethical. I think this in a way helps you take particular stands or part, decide that this is my side, this is where I would rather stand.
NP: Did you have, apart from the intellectual and cultural aspects of these circles, was there also any discussion or any awareness at the time on your part about injustices within Egypt?
HK: Yes, I could see it on campus because we had students who came to university driving new cars, who would not attend very frequently because they were already helping their parents with their businesses, and at the same time you had students who stood in line to get financial aid. This was very visible, the class dimension was stark visible on campus to me, this became very clear. Taking into part also the fact that the department of English is in a way a space in which, then, you had students who did the GSE which was the British diploma, which is now the IGCSE, whatever, which was something that cost a lot and you had to do it by the British Council, the Cambridge degree. There were students who came from international schools, they were very few at that time, there were students who came from international schools in the Arab countries where their parents' backgrounds. And also you had students who came from national schools who studies English just as a subject for many years, and made an effort. So you had this kind of, I'd say… not too poetic mosaic, but this kind of… which is something that we maintain until today. We refuse to put a requirement of being a graduate of an English language school or whatever. We have a degree of this mixture. Nowadays although, more of the upper classes go to AUC and private universities than they do come to us, but still we do get students, mostly girls because the parents would probably invest in their son to go to AUC but not with the girl. The girl would end up studying English at Cairo University. So, you get these things, yes. And to me, it was very clear, excuse me.
NP: Do you remember what we were saying? About the…
HK: Class.
NP: Students, yes. That you’ve got a lot of women who study in the English department.
HK: Yes. And you have these class varieties. So, right. Many women study and the majority of our professors were women as well. So this is a very empowering atmosphere I think for someone who is thinking of… gender issues and equality and so on.
NP: How is the atmosphere of the English department in comparison to other department and faculties on campus?
HK: In what sense?
NP: Do you think that it's more liberal? It's more… (Inaudible 0:05:36:7) I don't know.
HK: I think our department, I can talk of the faculty of arts because at faculty of arts, we have over 10 departments. And I think we are considered one of the most (Inaudible 0:05:57:8) in that sense that we have different classes, we have a majority of women. But we also have the men who decide to come and study English also are interesting. We have this class mixture which is not the case with many other departments whereby they have mostly mid-class. And we are not like the French and German literature departments which require being a graduate of a German school or a French school. So this is again a different category, and I think we are sometimes seen as an elitist department by other departments, but we are one of the biggest departments because our junior colleagues do not teach in the department, but they teach language in all the other departments where English is a requirement as a European language. So, yes, I think… I think in that sense, our department is seen as… to me, it's very much of a microcosm. And perhaps academically speaking, when it comes to scholarships, I think among the more serious… right. Yes, in terms of scholarships, I think in our case, one of the positive things about our department is that there is… in a way space for communication being updated with what's going on internationally, and at the same time, you have the privilege of being here, so you know, following what's going on, and I think in the area of comparative studies for instance, our department is (Inaudible 0:08:25:4) so… I think we pride also in the fact that many artists and critics are graduates of our department, so there is this space for a good scholarship as well.
NP: How did you first hear about women and memory forum?
HK: As I mentioned, Huda Sadda approached me when she was about to… together with Umayma and Huda Lutfi and Sumayya Ramadan to establish the women and memory forum, and the beginning was as a research group on a research project. She asked me to join them. I had just done my master's, come back from Leeds, and she asked me to join them as a research assistant. This was in 1995.
NP: And this was the first time that you'd heard of…
HK: Women and memory was not existent yet.
NP: Okay.
HK: We sat there and we came up with the name. So I was part of this meeting where we sat and we were thinking of how to create a name for the project. At that time it was a project and a group, and we were thinking of history, memory, gender, and we decided it would be "women and memory forum", and we were thinking of whether to have it as a centre but then we decided to have it as a forum, it's a meeting point, you know, where researchers interested in women and memory in the wide sense would come. That was the meeting that we were brainstorming for the name for this group. So…
NP: Did you feel that women and memory was different from other initiatives at that time concerning women's rights?
HK: At that time, the tool that I was familiar with was the New Woman foundation, because Shereen Abul Naga, our colleague was involved with the New Woman, so she used to bring to the department flyers and things, so I was aware, but at that time, I remember that to me, the New Woman stood … to me as I say, from what she showed us, to a place that was concerned with raising women's awareness about the reproductive rights and violence. These were the two things that were… of course, later, when I got to know the New Woman, it became much wider, but this was the first thing. And then of course, through women and memory, through Huda, I got to know Nawla and Amal and Hala Shukrallah and so on. The other place was the centre for Egyptian Women's Legal Assistance (SEWLA). That was… I knew of it as a place where women can go to seek legal assistance. And that was all I knew only of the existence, I didn't know of the Arab Women's League as Huda Badran's initiative, but I knew that something existed headed by Nawal Al-Sa'dawi, but I had no way to identify where it is or whatever. So, to me, it was interesting. What was very interesting at that time for me when Huda spoke of the idea of this research group was that I was beginning to develop these interests personally as a beginning scholar trying to find her way, that this would enable me to get access to knowledge produced about women, and in the future, to be able to perhaps contribute to empowering people who were in my position, who needed this kind of material, and particularly, since I was privileged enough to be able to read in English, I was aware of all those colleagues of ours in the department of Arabic for instance, sociology, and history who did not have access to English, they only read in Arabic, and for whom feminism, gender, if you even spoke of the term had to be explained because there were all those stereotypes… you know, media representations and so on. So basically, to me it was a space, and it was something, kind of an extension to what I'm doing at the university. I was thinking the university would be where I'd be teaching, and this is where I would do my research.
NP: Why was the Women and Memory Forum set up outside the university instead of an initiative within.
HK: Huda Sadda can tell you about it, but she told us because this was one of the things that we were thinking of at a point related to one of the main issues when it comes to women organizing, which is separatism or integration, whether you should exist on your own or whether you should start, whether you should work from within another institution. Women and Memory started as a project within a liberal organization; the New Civil Forum, so they had this women's project because they were a liberal research centre, mostly in the area of political and social research studies, they were… as liberals, they wanted to have a women's project, and this is how Huda Sadda whom they knew personally established… when we established Women and Memory as a research group, were a project within the New Civil Forum. But if we're talking of the Women and Memory Forum, it was only later on where this independent centre was established. It wasn't established within the university because the university was not interested. It's as simple as that. So if you ask Mrs. Huda Sadda, she can tell you about it because she approached university administration to have this kind of centre, research program within academia rather than within the civil society. So it was basically there was no choice.
NP: And haven't become part of civil society? Part of that emerging… there was a lot of new organizations in the nineties that emerged, and facing particular challenging with regards to relations with the government. How did you feel about that situation? Was it something you thought about or was it something that was unexpected to have the government (Inaudible 0:16:41:10) Women and Memory Forum on civil society?
HK: Yes. There was a direct point in the whole thing towards the end of the nineties, I think 2000, 2002, I don't remember the date exactly, when the government simply said that we are illegal and we had to reregister as a foundation, either as an association or as a foundation. So it was very clear that there was a state threat, practically we had to resolve the Women and Memory Forum and we had tore-establish ourselves under the new law as a foundation. So there was this very concrete thing. But also, the second half of the nineties, I represented Women and Memory in the so-called annual women's organizations' committee whereby all of us co-organized women's day celebrations. So we had contacts with all the other organizations. Solidarity action was part of our world, and although at that time I wasn't directly connected with other human right organizations, but I remember for instance when (Inaudible 0:18:22:0) went on strike and I'm not sure whether I was on Women and Memory then or not yet. And I went to show them support although nobody knew me. I went to their… later on I got to know Aida Saif Al-Dawla, and Suzan Fayad and Magda Adli. They're great friends of mine. But then I was very young, and to me, solidarity with those actions of the state was quite obvious; attack on the civil society was a continuous part of our lives. And later on, I remember we had difficulties for instance organizing this annual event because two or three years later, nobody wanted us anymore, because they considered us too vocal, too critical particularly when we would… one of the sessions that we had problems organizing was… we had a theme every year, so when it was violence against women, nobody would really care much, but I remember the one on political participation, then we had difficulty having a place accept us. The so-called Mubarak Library who received us for a number of years then the following year told us "it's not going to work" and started giving us excuses and it became clear that they don't want us anymore. I remember direct threats to someone like the New Woman who had a law case against them, attempt to resolve them. Again I don't have a date in my mind but I remember that we all… the act of solidarity was that all women's organizations representative would go to the courthouse that day, and once they call the name of the New Woman, we would all stand up, and this was an impressive day because you go to the courthouse. I didn't know many of the people, I knew some of them of course. I went in and it was packed. I sat down and then they called Nawla Darwish as the representative of the New Woman, the whole… 200, 300 people whoever was there just stood up, not only the lawyers who accompanied Nawla. Of course this was the first time I entered the courthouse, so it was quite a disillusion because I see the court on television whereby you have people seated nicely, you have the lawyer there, and you have a judge there, and then you have the lawyer standing up in his place or her place and defending. Here you would have, they're calling and then the lawyers were about 10 lawyers. Of course now I know them, Ahmad Saif Al-Islam and so on. Nabil Al-Hilali I think is one. They all went with Nawla Darwish because they called Nawla Darwish up to the lawyer and they were negotiating and all of us were standing there. So if this is the kind of question that you were thinking of, these are forms of solidarity in addition of course to petitions and… on a higher level, there are constantly at critical moments, there were all these meetings about how to take action, who to consult, how to go about it, whether to reregister as an association or as a foundation and so on and so forth. Those years of working together, not perhaps that closely, with the other women's organizations also I think had its very important outcome, which is, with the beginning of the revolution, we did not take part, did not go out into the streets under the women's banner. Each of us went on their own just as the majority of Egyptian people, without being directed or mobilized in a concrete way. And then in February, we were supposed to meet to start organizing our match event, annual event on women's day. But of course when we met on February 15th or 16th, we decided that we had a statement, and I think that the statements of the women's movement are worthy of some consideration, maybe analysis at a later point since 2011. And we decided that we should not be working now although we were as civil society organizations earlier, what brought us together was everything that had to do with organizing and everything that had to do with women's rights. We decided that we had to get involved as women's organizations in the political scene because everything that's going to happen is going to influence us as women, and at that meeting, we decided to… not at that meeting, on the following meeting, we decided to act under one banner which is the coalition of feminist organizations. And since then, much of our work has been represented under the banner of the coalition of feminist organizations. To me of course, one of the more important ideas that started as an initiative and then developed to something I think much more serious was our engagement with the constitution, because in 2011 as early as April 2011, Women and Memory perhaps because Amina and I… Amina is a colleague at Women and Memory, Huda was away and Amina is my generation so we get to… and Amina is a historian at AUC, and we thought that perhaps it's time, since they were discussing all this, whether the constitution first or whatever first, that constitution will eventually be a key issue. And in April 2011, we started our first meeting trying to create a research group that would start reading the constitution, a study group for the constitution. We were joined by Amani from Nadim centre, from (Inaudible 0:25:03:5) Salma Al Naqqash and Yara who now is the IPR, Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights. Dalia Abd Al-Hameed, the New Woman were not interested in the research group. And we started working on the constitution. The Women and Memory group, we started meeting on a weekly basis, reading constitutions, our constitution history plus looking at Arab constitutions. We had a division of labor among us, and at the end we came up with 14 demands that we thought would be necessary for the inclusion in the constitution. And I think it was in June before the summer break, we had a meeting here where we invited the women committees and all the political parties, we invited all the organizations dealing with women's rights, everybody for a discussion of the outcome of this thing. And it was adopted by the coalition in which you had groups such as (CEWLA) Centre for Egyptian Women's Legal Assistance, and (ACT), Azza Kamel and Azza Suleiman. Each of them through their connections and contact in the governorates had a survey whereby I think there were 10 thousand women interviewed by (CEWLA) and almost 10 thousand by (ACT) about their demands in the constitution. (Inaudible 0:26:44:2) a survey. At the same time, the New Woman was focusing on including criteria. They engaged with the criteria of selecting members to the constitution assembly, so the work was divided between us in a way not very strictly designed. We did not say "we have to do this and this, you do this" but there was this kind of an initiative. Women and Memory, because we were more into research, so we started reading constitutions, we started comparing women's rights across our own constitutional history, and coming up with what should be included in the new constitution. The New Woman research centre who is more in touch with other organizations who are more involved with political parties because many of them became members in political parties, they took the line of mobilizing through including the coalition of feminist organizations within what then called the "Constitution for All Egyptians Front". That was trying to exercise pressure on the Islamists to include the liberal and other voices within the process. So this is basically how my work within Women and Memory has been actually lately much more focused towards activism than scholarship which was my initial concern. But it's beyond our hands, this is a moment where I think everybody should be in a way involved. And the positive thing is that we produced one document in the name of the coalition of feminist organizations that was based on the surveys plus our own demands that were revised through discussions and meetings and so on. And then we sent them to the first constituent assembly and then we sent them to the second constituent assembly, and then we went through the parliament to submit a copy in March 2012. It was our way of celebrating women's day, to go up to the parliament with the demands. And now we were lucky enough to have people like Mouna Zulfaqar (Inaudible 0:29:28:1) in the committee, so they took our demands, and we see them now in the constitution, so this is very rewarding I must say.
NP: So you're happy with the constitution?
HK: I'm happy with the rights and freedoms section in the constitution. And if I were to vote today, I would still have to make up my mind, because I would want to say yes to women's rights, to minority rights, to rights and liberties, all the rights and duties section. I would want to say No to subjecting civilians to military courts. So there's yes and there's no, and I wouldn't boycott, because I will not align myself with Islamists who boycott or the Brotherhood basically who boycott. So I'm still (Inaudible 0:30:39:9) I don't know. I will have to make up my mind on that day. I have to go and I have to cast a vote, but I don't know what I'm going to do. Probably it's very similar to the situation of choosing between

TAPE 3

HK: Shafiq and Morsi. I would probably end up going and saying what I think of the whole thing. I did validate it by balloting that way, but at least I went.
NP: Can we go back to the period leading up to the 25th of January? You mentioned that you were involved in 8th of March.
HK: 9th of March.
NP: Sorry, 9th of March.
HK: This is at the university.
NP: Could you say a bit more about the 9th of March group. What were its activities? What was your role within the group?
HK: Right, the 9th of March, when it started 2003, I was… okay, let's say that before the 9th of March, there were critical moments in the history of our university whereby there would be a call for a demonstration on campus. Usually at a director's office, and I would go, and there was a group of academic activists whose faces were familiar to me because I used to see them, and then they started organizing. They knew each other much earlier since the seventies mostly. This was a generation, Huda Sadda's generation. Most of them knew themselves through the seventies. What brought them together was the Intifada, the Iraq war, the war on Kuwait, alright? These issues… the death of a student on campus in 1990 by tear gas. So I wasn't part of this circle, the committee for defending national culture. She's not here but she's (Inaudible 0:02:06:9) Amina Rasheed. So, I knew about these things through figures in our faculty of arts such as Sayyed Al-Bahrawi who taught Arabic , fourth year, such as Amina Rasheed whom I knew, saw her and knew her later on from the film about her "Four Women from Egypt". There were a few of those figures, Huda Gindi, my supervisor at Cairo University who has been very concerned with university issues. And I remember that we started and one of the first meetings had to do with internal elections, where we had elections, not of deans because at that point they were all appointed, but elections of what they call faculty club. And I remember attending one of the earliest meetings in 2003 where I was already becoming involved not in an organized way but through a friend of mine, Aida Saif Al-Dawla. Kifaya was beginning to be formed and the first demonstrations were taking place with the Israeli attack on Lebanon, they were mostly these kind of things. Until I remember the first time Kamal Khalil started slogans against the Egyptian regime. So there was this, and then you would see the same faces here and there. There was a meeting at Cairo University. I remember Hani Al-Hussaini, our colleague from the department of mathematics, presenting the idea of the date that we should organize ourselves into a group whose focus would be… yes, because this was the time when security started annoying academics because of political involvement. So whereby we should be working on campuses and we should be focusing not on international issues as much as on our own academic freedoms. No to security interference on our… on the campus and so on and so forth. And I remember the day when he even suggested the date. It was 2003 I think, and he explained the significance of the date 9 March. Ahmad Lutfi Sayyed, I didn't know the story… he resigned because the ministry interfered and they kicked Taha Hussein from university, they stopped him from working because of his book, and this is where Ahmad Lutfi Sayyed, director of university, the president, resigned as a way of exercising pressure on the government. So they had to go back and Taha Hussein returned. So he suggested the date and this is how it started. And then my role, when we started I was among the younger generation, so what we have is we have a monthly meeting that we have until today, first Wednesday of every month then I don't remember what day of the month it was. We would either be responding to things happening, either documenting security interferences and so on and so forth. So the beginning was with the idea of having an annual conference celebration, and this is how I got involved with many technical details. Working on collecting material from senior members of the group who had concrete examples of either security interferences and preventing them from travelling to conferences, documenting all these kinds of what we considered unlawful and unacceptable. And then of course solidarity trying to create a file exposing what was going on, corruption and so on and so forth, and of course indirectly, we played a role because I was among 2 or 3 in the faculty in the department of English. I would be talking about it, alerting people to these kinds of things. When there was a form of protest whether it's a march and so on, I would be informing. And then gradually of course we started being a source of support for students in a way that students needing support from academics, knowing that we are not connected with the administration, that we would be on their side. So working with students, not approaching them as much as having this open space for them to approach us. In my case for instance, during university student elections, some of those students would come and ask me whether I could give 10 minutes for them to introduce their program to the students before my class or at the end of my class. You know, providing the space that would otherwise not be. So this was before the revolution. Constant stands. I remember call for strike because there were two directions; one direction had to do with changing the law in a way to reintroduce elections on campus. So I was among the people who worked on the revision of the university law, and there was the other group who was more focused on restructuring the salaries, because our salaries at that point were very, and still continue to be very low. So, basically these were the areas where we worked, and within this we had a small group within the English department in the faculty of arts again, working on the law, suggesting amendments and so on and so forth. And this is why February 2011, it was before the revolution when the university was open. We managed to organize as 9th of March, there were members within our movement who strategically coordinated with "University Staff for Reform", the Brotherhood on campuses, and jointly, one of things that were organized jointly was a conference, a meeting attended by over 5 thousand faculty members. February, I don't remember the date, 11th… no, not 11th, because this was when Mubarak stepped down immediately following that, because during the 18 days, we coordinated marches; a march from in front of the university, another march from… so there were 2 massive marches that were organized by 9th of March with "University Staff for Reform". One was on a Tuesday and one was on a Friday. I don't remember now the dates. I think it was the 7th of February and the other one was the day that Mubarak stepped down, because we marched, workers marched, and everybody marched to Tahrir the Friday, I think it was the 11th of February. So this is the kind of thing that went on. In addition, within the movement, we don't have structures, we don't have concrete structures within the movement, within 9 March I mean. But there are a few people in the faculty of arts, Madiha Doos, Amina Rasheed, Sayyed Al-Bahrawi, myself, are the more involved, and then there are others who are less involved. What we did and this has not been written, there's this history that needs to be written, was because one of our concerns at 9 March was reintroducing elections. So following this mega conference that was organized then at the beginning of February as I said, it was very funny because then, the idea was that this was the revolution of the young people, the young generation. So to avoid of course the clash of egos as I would call it among the University Staff for Reform and 9 March who would sit on the podium that day, they decided that they would ask the juniors to sit there, and in a way organize the whole discussion. So I was there to represent 9 March and a colleague of mine, Ahmad Abd Al-Maqsoud, was there to represent the |Brotherhood. And we were on the panel and of course the 5 thousand people when they saw us, most of them professors, they said "what are those kids doing here? We want Abul Ghar and Abdul Galeel Mustafa". We were sitting down there and people came shouting at us "how dare you sideline your professors and occupy the stage?" it was a very… so Abul Ghar and Abdul Galeel had to go up and say "we want the new generation…" but anyway, what was good about that day was that there was a document produced at the end of the day in which we vowed as faculty to democratize the process on campus and our agenda was… if I remember, the documents are there but it's now memory. One as to start working again on the new law to reintroduce elections, the other one was the salary schedule, and number 3 was to work on trying to identify and offer all possible leader support, etc, to those who have been detained during the revolution. And based on this, we went back to faculty of arts and because our dean was supposed to end his term in July, we refused to accept someone being appointed and we found that this would be a very good opportunity for us to start the process of elections without giving the impression of toppling him down, you know it's not another replica of Mubarak where you remove him and you bring someone elected, but his term ends so that the new one would be elected rather than appointed. And we managed to mobilize the faculty of arts, a wonderful experience actually whereby we organized elections; we created our own laws through meetings. The process of elections, the criteria for those running for elections, and a whole process went whereby we ended up… Randa Abu Bakr which was amazing. She was a young professor, she is a young professor, one of the youngest professors in the faculty of arts, a woman being selected by the majority to be the new… of course this did not happen, she did not become dean of our faculty. But because this was so serious and the government felt things were running out of its hands, they had to introduce regulations for elections. A process in which again we 9 March were involved in by meeting parliamentarians, presenting… I attended one of those meetings with the Egyptian Social Democratic party, Ayman Abul Ela, introducing our own vision concerning the process of elections, and this is why the democratic process actually started on universities, on campuses. So now we have not only… we have elected deans, we have elected presidents, we have elected deans, and we have elected heads of departments, which is something that never happened before because when it comes to deans, heads of departments, they are elected directly not by representational… what do you call it? You do not elect a body that does the selection for you but it's direct elections, whereas with director, we elect our electoral college, our representatives would then elect the dean. And for the first time, because up till the early nineties, deans were elected, only deans were elected but they were elected by professors only. In this case all are represented even junior assistants are represented in the process. So, to me, this is a revolution on campus that has not been documented or written about. I gave a presentation at the university college union in London a couple of years ago. They invited me through friends who were active at the UCU, but it hasn't been written about. So yea, if you ask me, my priorities… I constantly need to shift my priorities between things that need to be done at university level and things that need to be done at the feminist, women's organizations' level. With the constitution process, we did also as 9March, we did a discussion of our rights that we would like to see in the constitution, and we held a conference July 2001 I think at Ain Shams University. And since we had already started working with women's rights, I was asked by my colleagues to introduce this experience to our colleagues in 9 March, the way in which we came up with those demands, and at the same time, this was kind of a workshop in which we as academics would come up with our own demands based on our historical documents, you know, higher educational rights in our constitutions, and would come up with one document that we would submit in the name of 9 March to the constituent assembly. So that's basically it. Recently, 9 March, we are of course concerned with academic freedoms on campuses. The case that was won raised by 9 March represented by Abd Al-Galeel Mustafa in 2010, we got the rights to kick out security. We're talking here about state security, from campuses. And this never happened until after the revolution where they had to leave and although this is a part that I'm not involved in, Hani Hussaini is more involved in the process of training the administrative security body on campuses to deal with our safety and security on campuses. So this is an area that we are now concerned with. we had the latest statements had to do with what happened in front of Cairo University that ended up with killing a student in the faculty of engineering with attempts at occupying campuses which never happened with Cairo University so far. Yesterday things went smoothly as well luckily unlike what's going on in Al-Azhar. And I think one of the main reasons with Al-Azhar is apart from the fact that they have a majority of the student body and the faculty body is in a way from the Brotherhood or as we say Brotherhood lovers or supporters, but the problem with Al-Azhar is that they have their own law, and their leadership is not elected, they're still appointed by the state. And this creates grievances of course among students. With our students, they know that Jaber Nassar is elected, that all the deans have been elected, that the communication and interaction… we have a long history of movements such as 9 March protecting students on campuses, so I think, I personally do not see us falling into this generalization of students burning up universities because you have to have this clear distinction between the history of each and every institution. Even Ain Shams and Cairo are different because Ain Shams had their last president before the revolution, had organized gangs on campus who would not only bully and beat up opposition students on campus, but even professors. So Abd Al-Galeel Mustafa, Radwa Ashour, Madiha Doos I think was there. I didn't go. In December, November or December 2010 immediately before the revolution, they were beaten by thugs at Ain Shams University because the administration used those thugs against students as well as any forms of opposition on campus. So the history of each and every university is different, and this is why our expectation of what could happen at different universities is different. We know that Ain Shams has this history of thuggery that could possibly be even currently out of the university president's control. They could be working for whichever parties. We know Cairo University has this history of the reform of the security, the administrative security started even before the revolution. Once the lawsuit was won, Hussam Kamel took the whole things seriously then. And this was of course intensified with the revolution when things were clear that we would not accept to go back to what used to be going on. But the threats are there of course. It's not all rosy.
NP: Have the political situation and the 30th of June impacted upon either activism with the 9th of March or with Women and Memory Forum?
HK: This is an important question. Within… let me start with 9 March because it's clearer, it's much more obvious. 9 March was a movement that was open and our way of communication was an open… not an open but a closed e-mail group. But anybody who was an academic in any university could join, right? So the communication was open, and also if somebody came up with a statement, with an idea, with a (Inaudible 0:23:14:10) meeting and so on and so forth. And the space there… we had even Brotherhood people in this group. You have all sorts of people representing different ideologies; Nasserists, Marxists, liberals and so on, all of these are part of this large group 9 March. And therefore, what unites us is academic freedoms and autonomy, our own space, no to security. However, following 30th of June, it is a fact that there were people within the group who became pro-Brotherhood very vocally although they did not earlier seem to be pro-Brotherhood. And there are those within the same group who are supporting Sisi. They want the security to go and put an end to the violence and so on. And therefore, it is a very tricky space because when you issue a statement, it has to be representative of all of us. And therefore, focusing on… we all agree on condemning the ministry of interior. Nobody can't… the different maybe could be between those like myself who do not want to see the police even near the university and those who believe that they should not enter and be inside but they could be stationed outside. This is the kind of discussion that could be going on among us. And of course, there isn't anything concrete that I could tell you but this is the kind of discussion that could be going within the group. And what we try to do is constantly to focus on the thing that unites us all. With Women and Memory Forum, it's slightly different because if you're thinking even of Women and Memory Forum, you will think of Huda Sadda who jokingly talks of herself as being part of the new regime, "I am the authority". You have Umayma Abu Bakr who was a member of Al-Wasat party who belongs to those who are now being… not herself but her political circles are those who are now in prison. And there's someone like me who is neither this nor that, who's critical of this and that, and who perhaps does not align herself with anything concrete currently on the scene. So if we're talking about Women and Memory, we cannot speak of having one position, and this is for instance why, when we were talking, although the constitution has been our initiative within the women's organizations, but we decided that we are going to… first of all, we stopped leading the constitution process ever since Huda got into the committee because we decided we're not going to even appear as though we are propagating Huda Sadda's stand within the thing, so we decided from that moment we were follower. The major initiative was (Inaudible 0:26:54:1) whereby they were organizing a number of meetings in the governorates with young women's initiatives in Mansoura, Asyut, Souhag, Aswan, and Alexandria. And the idea was to use the interest in the constitution to raise women's rights as a… and our clear position was that we are going to be part of this as long as we're talking about women's rights in the constitution, not about vote "yes" or "no" or whatever. We're not getting into the area of mobilizing for. So this was our stand as Women and Memory concerning… and this is a change in our way of work towards the constitution that is part of what happened on the 30th of June. Again, if you ask us, many people would make a clear statement "let's vote yes for the constitution". We decided that we're not, because within our Women and Memory, Huda would say yes, Umayma would say no. as I said I'm still unclear, right? If we're talking about our staff, you would find the same thing there, so we're not mobilizing towards one thing. We do not… however, our focus continue to be women's demands, women's rights. We all agree that women's rights that are included in the constitution are great. We are conscious that if and probably the constitution will get a yes, our work will start the following stage. This is not the end, this only a beginning where we'll start looking at how to change the laws to provide women with more rights in the light of what's in the constitution. Does this answer your question? And mind you, I think if we're talking yes, we're talking about Women and Memory, we're talking about the board that includes Huda Sadda, Umayma Abu Bakr, Sahar Subhi. We have not even discussed whether it's a yes or no. I do not belong to the board but I'm a founding member and I'm more closely involved with the administration of the place. With the staff, we haven't even discussed whether it's a yes or a no or whatever, although we have taken part in the discussions around what rights we are calling for and demanding and what has been included in the constitution. Does this answer your question?
NP: Yeah. Apart from the political process, are you involved in any other initiatives or activities, for example through Women and Memory that are dealing with the cultural aspects of these political changes that are happening? For example, looking at women's representations in the media. Are you doing anything like that?
HK: We're not doing thing, but one of the projects and perhaps you'd want to meet Maysan our colleague who is the program's manager, and she's working on it with Huda Sadda. One of the most important… actually this is how Women and Memory in many ways started with the idea of documenting women's lives, the archive of women's voices, and before the revolution… I'm glad that you raised this because I would have missed it completely.

TAPE 4

HK: Until the revolution, the focus was on recording the life stories of women over 70 who lived at a time in which they were in many ways among the first generation of women carving their own space in the public sphere. And there were those political activists. Mostly Lamees worked on the communist activists. There were the artists Nadia Lutfi, Hind Rustom. There were the educators, the teachers. So this was the kind of area that Women and Memory was focused on, but since the revolution, we decided to document the revolution stories of young women and we now have life stories… not life stories as much as stories of young women activists involved in the revolution. And I think there are several categories. Maysan is more in control of this or aware of all the details. We got some help with Nadine Nabigh whom you might know. Nadine Nabigh was here for a year, and during that year, she helped us develop, it was her idea actually, to develop a timeline of women's activism since the revolution with the help of Dana and another colleague of ours, collecting everything written about women, everything documenting women's participation in the revolution. So we have this project plus we have the project of women's stories of the revolution, and the stories include feminist activists from different categories; there are women who have been part of… who had been somehow either politically active as political activists or as feminist activists before the revolution. There's another category of those young women who came into this with the revolution and so on and so forth. So this is a new direction in feminism, and this is a project that is still in the process of developing. We don't have anything yet, material that has come out of it. But this is an area that is being developed as part of Women and Memory documentation.
NP: Is there anything I haven't asked you about that you want to add?
HK: There isn't anything that I particularly… I didn't come prepared. Maybe this is a good thing for you, I don't know. But perhaps yes. You didn't ask the question that we're usually very often asked about whether I can personally see a generational shift in interest personality. I keep commenting to my colleagues that until recently, I was the junior member of Women and Memory. Amina Al-Bindari and myself were considered the young generation, and Women and Memory as a whole was seen as one of the younger groups. A position that was shaken by Nazra. We always laugh because Nazra, they have their 20s, 30s as their age group founders, members, and staff whereas in our case, until recently before we had the group of young researchers joining us in the past two years, basically we were the 30s, 40s, and 50s. this was the kind of thing. What I can tell is for instance that with the generations, Women and Memory works very well with Nazra, and for a while I was worried that perhaps it has to do with the fact that we are the academics, we are older, so perhaps they… I was wondering to what extent are they giving us more space. Are we recreating a patriarchal structure there? This was a question. And a question that was raised by me particularly very straightforwardly during those trips to the governorates because I was the oldest of the group and I was the only PhD holder. And some of those, Salma Al-Naqqash and Aya, they were my students one day at Cairo University, so I was just concerned about the politics within. To what extent are they aware of the existence of such a power kind of thing? And I was very pleased. Perhaps you can develop this further or maybe Salma will present a different perspective, but I was informed very gladly that the younger generation of feminists and activists including Nazra and their circles to which they bring us, that they find Women and Memory as one of the very few organizations that are not patronizing them. So this is something that is very important because we are very conscious of it. We are very cautious internally not to have this typical (Inaudible 0:06:35:6) structure within Women and Memory, and with the very close work with Nazra recently during the past couple of years particularly having Salma Al-Naqqash was leading the project, being my former student one day. I was raising those questions: to what extent is there an underlying… and perhaps this is an area that hasn't been explored, and I'm too closely involved to be able to, you know. If I say or write about what I'm telling you now, it might seem like self-glorification, whatever. But I think this is an area that should be explored by someone who's outside to see the… because as you know, with the revolution, there's this sense among the young people of empowerment of the young people, particularly Egyptian young people who are raised within what you can say a patriarchal structure, not only in terms of gender but in many ways. So I would be very interested to read someone's analysis of this generational kind of… how you see this generational interaction that is important so that we do not end up reproducing those structures, you know? I don't know if I'm making myself clear.
NP: Yeah, I think this is very interesting. Did you ever feel when you were…
HK: Yes, exactly, this is the point. I was very conscious of them being my seniors, of Huda, Umayma, Huda Lutfi. I was very conscious of this, and at the same time I was conscious of Huda's efforts and Umayma's efforts not to reproduce this with me in particular, perhaps because I was more closely involved with the work. But definitely I ended up doing many of the things that I was doing simply because I was the younger. And at that time probably because I was not marries, I did not have a family, so I would have more time. And probably now I'm very maybe conscious so as not to fall into such a trap particularly since I have a son and I realize that sometimes I might be asking Maysan to do certain things for me simply because I can't physically do them. I can't go to a meeting at 4 pm. I cannot be in a meeting so I send her and I make the point that whenever there are meeting outside of Women and Memory, that Maysan is there. And lately even Aya is there, so that the impression is not that I go with my secretary. We have been trying to do this and as I told you, Women and Memory delegated me very early on to represent them with the women's organizations, probably because most of the meetings were in the evening where Huda's kids were still young and Umayma's boys were still young, you know what I'm talking about. And the same thing is now with me and I'm very conscious with Maysan and Aya, with the younger generation. To what extent am I asking them to attend certain meeting at 3 pm simply because I have to be at home waiting for my son coming back from school? And to what extent is this undermining… you know what I mean. Am I undermining anything? It is difficult, the generational part and particularly with the idea of the fact that in my case, I have domestic responsibilities that are probably as demanding as my work and what I want to do, whereas I look with a degree of envy at Maysan who does not still have this in her life, and I'm just very careful about the way in which Maysan, when she represents Women and Memory, that she's not seen as substituting me but as being a decision maker. And this is something that we try to make very clear that when you go, you're not there taking notes and then telling people "I have to ask Hala or Huda", but we can discuss things and this is the minimum that we can take decisions on the spot. This is a way of dealing with a situation, of empowering young people. But to me, this is a question that you didn't raise, and I think perhaps this is a very personal concern to me because as I said, I've been in the organization ever since I was very young, and I was prepared. We did not have money to be able to send invitations. I used to go from home to home to leave the invitations to events with people. I used to do the things that now we pay a courier to do. But I wonder also to what extent is there is this generational burden, and whether this could be happening unconsciously. Right, yeah. Talk to Maysan I think. Maysan maybe, I don't know. Because you're interested in activism, right? I don't know whether you're interested, I don't know if your research, whether you want to

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