UW-Whitewater professor garners international award for scholarship in Egyptian drama

August 17, 2020

In the sunbathed city of Tanta in northern Egypt, where the Nile River delta fans toward the Mediterranean Sea, a girl grew up in a house of poetry.

The house included parents Ibrahim and Layla, who loved books and taught in the high school. Literature, lively discussions and the aroma of cardamom-spiced Turkish coffee were ever-present in the family home.

The child, named Hala, loved to sit with her father, an Arabic language teacher and “an amazing man.” They bonded in front of the television where the two would count the gaffs of television newscasters reading Arabic, which has both spoken and written dialects.

“My dad would recite poetry at the dinner table,” she said, remembering the readings over evening meals of cheese, falafel, olives, eggs and yogurt with her mother and two sisters. “The Arabic word for a line of poetry is ‘bayt,’ which also means ‘house.’ So people literally dwelt in these houses of poetry.”

This love of scholarship carried Hala Ghoneim into university at Cairo and doctoral work at UW-Madison. Now an associate professor in the Department of Languages and Literatures at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, Ghoneim teaches four levels of Arabic, a World of Ideas course and a course about Islam.

“I now teach Arabic like my dad, but in a different setting and level,” she said. “My mom taught philosophy, and I teach ‘World of Ideas,’ which involves a philosophy component.”

Hala Ghoneim, right, at home in Fitchburg with her own daughter, Layla, and their cat, Tut, on Friday, Aug. 7, 2020. (UW-Whitewater photo/Craig Schreiner)

Ghoneim’s scholarly article based on her study of three contemporary Egyptian playwrights, “Indigenization and Modernization: The Invention of a Truly Egyptian Drama,” has earned the 2020 International Award of Excellence from the New Direction in Humanities Journal Collection.

The research paper, which was published in the International Journal of Critical Cultural Studies, deals with three contemporary, Egypt-born playwrights — Tawfiq al-Hakim, Yusuf Idris and Naguib Surur — and how each sought an authentic Egyptian writing for theatre while coping with inevitable Western influences.

“This literary debate is true to other aspects in real life,” said Ghoneim. “And so it really is not (limited to) literature. How do we achieve progress and not renounce authenticity? What does progress mean? Sometimes it means moving away from tradition. Sometimes it means moving back to tradition.”

“I enjoy reading al-Hakim but I am very critical of his thought process,” she said, showing her father’s love of language and then her philosopher-mother’s quest for truth. “I am capable of liking something and being critical of it at the same time. We (scholars) have to be in the in-between state of embracing something but not the whole thing.”

“All of them are really amazing writers,” she adds. She describes Al-Hakim as an intellectual who was in a hurry for Egyptian theatre to catch up with the West. The works of Idris and Surur are more relatable for general audiences, particularly Surur, who, ironically, is not translated in the West. All three playwrights were active in the mid-to-late 20^th century and all are deceased. 

In her current research, Ghoneim focuses on two contemporary women writers who also are striving for an authentic voice amid forces of male dominance, nationalism and post-colonialism, and who want to be understood, not stereotyped. This can mean simply being seen as brave rather than oppressed, she said.

Hala Ghoneim serves basbusa, a dessert recipe from her native Egypt. (UW-Whitewater photo/Craig Schreiner)

At UW-Whitewater, undergraduate students in the required World of Ideas class see Ghoneim as a genuine scholar and teacher who loves what she does. They are drawn into debates over such texts as Plato’s “Republic” because Ghoneim brings the ideas from the writings into the here-and-now.

“Every reading of a text is a new birth to that text,” she said “It’s really rewarding when, after a few weeks, they’re valuing the new revelations they acquire as they do this. Every meeting has to tell the students why this is relevant to us today.”

At UW-Whitewater, professors are classroom teachers and researchers in that order, a model which fits Ghoneim perfectly.

“I think people ultimately must teach what they know,” she said. “Just knowing something and not sharing it is like cooking an amazing meal and not sharing it with someone. You’re supposed to do research, with the goal of sharing the knowledge and teaching people what you know.”

“Education opened windows of opportunity for me,” added Ghoneim. “It changed my opinions. It freed my thought. I want what I know to be transmitted to somebody else. That’s what teaching does.”