The Willfulness of a Missing Frame: Ahmed Zaki and the Politics of Visual Resistance

52 Pages·2017·0.79 MB·English

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Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects CUNY Graduate Center
6-2017
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ooff VViissuuaall RReessiissttaannccee
Miriam M. Gabriel
City University of New York Graduate Center
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THE WILLFULNESS OF A MISSING FRAME: AHMED ZAKI AND THE POLITICS OF
VISUAL RESISTANCE

by

MIRIAM GABRIEL

A master’s thesis submitted to the graduate faculty in the Middle Eastern Studies Department in
partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of the Master of Arts, the City University of
New York

2017
© 2017
MIRIAM GABRIEL
All Rights Reserved
ii
The Willfulness of a Missing Frame: Ahmed Zaki and the Politics of Visual Resistance
by
Miriam Gabriel

This manuscript has been read and accepted by the Graduate Faculty in the Middle Eastern
Studies Program in satisfaction of the thesis requirement for the degree of Master of Arts

Approved by

Date Christopher Stone
Thesis Advisor

Date Beth Baron
Executive Officer

THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
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ABSTRACT

The Willfulness of a Missing Frame: Ahmed Zaki and the Politics of Visual Resistance
by
Miriam Gabriel

Advisor: Christopher Stone

Ahmed Zaki (1949-2005) is one of Egyptian cinema’s most prominent leading actors, with
work spanning three decades of critical films that informed a generation’s visual register of
masculinity. However, the beginnings of his career were marked by public skepticism around his
place as a leading actor due to him being “too dark” and “too poor”; as his career continued to
flourish, those very markings of racing and classing Zaki because a foundation for increasingly
stamping his public image with the “authenticity” of an Egyptian citizen. At a particularly
neoliberal moment in the Egyptian economy, that of the early 80s, new directors brought with
them unexpectedly fresh faces for leading actors, including Ahmed Zaki. While his talent has
usually been uncontested as an artist, his social place as a performative body shifted so much
between his early and late career: while he started his career as a lead in the 80s playing mostly
roles that challenged the middle-class, pro-military masculine ideal, his latter career became
marked by playing some of Egypt’s most revered, and notorious, military leaders, such as
presidents Nasser and Sadaat. Focusing mostly on Sara Ahmed’s performative theory of
Willfulness, this thesis reexamines a nonlinear history of Ahmed Zaki’s social body and what it
says about the tumultuous mechanisms of militarism in shaping notions of masculinity, and how
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gestures of inhabiting this masculinity can be quite effective – if a certain effect is to be desired –
in laying bare the impenetrable foundations on which performances of militaristic masculinity
usually rely. As a final note of artistic advocacy, this paper calls for a revisit of one of Ahmed
Zaki’s early work given the renewed contract of austere militarism in Egypt after 2013, a time of
a revolution that persistently is yet never was. The film is The Innocent (1984), where Zaki plays
a soldier in a work of Egyptian cinema that is uncharacteristically so few of words, brimming with
gestures, and concluding with a censored yet still viewable ending.

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Table of Contents:

Text:
The Willfulness of a Missing Frame: Ahmed Zaki and the Politics of Visual Resistance…1
Bibliography ……………………………………………………………………………………..43

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He is the Emperor. He is Egyptian Cinema’s “black tiger.” He is the boss and the top dog1;
he is Mr. President and his Excellency the Minister. In early 90s Egypt, young boys and men lined
up at their local barber shop to don his crew cut, his urban-worker’s crown of a shave: the
Kaborya.2 Similarly, the myriad epithets of grandeur that inscribe his place in public memory cull
their coinage from his own work as a leading actor. His name is Ahmed Zaki, a name that rings
with memory and multiplicity of representative iterations for Egyptian viewers between the mid-
seventies and the year 2005, when he passed. He has been reinscribed after the roles of a poor
Egyptian boxer who rises to international stardom (The Black Tiger, 1984) an Upper-Egypt drug
dynast who falls as quickly as he rises (The Emperor, 90), and an eerily perfected reincarnation of
former President Gamal Abdel Nasser (Nasser ’65, 1998). When known to an international
audience, Ahmed Zaki is usually referenced as the actor who played Nasser.
Together, these titles collage a portrait of masculine authority as mediated between roles
that inhabit both formal office and outcast edge, a shifting nationalist masculine ideal that, if
personified, seems to study the rules of institutional membership front to back before deciding the
appropriate course of navigating this membership - by embodying the foundational heroes, by
going rogue, by returning to family and home, or by descending into despair. Meanwhile, Zaki
himself as a public figure is also popularized through an adjectival biography of his “humble
beginnings,” as an orphaned country boy3; a dark and handsome next-door neighbor; a workaholic
fatherly ideal; and, finally, an “innate” genius. A lonesome artistic virtuoso.

1 Two of many possible translations for the lay honorary title al-za’iim.
2 Meaning “crab” and the plural “crabs,”also the name of a film starring Ahmed Zaki, released in 1990.
3 Translation of Ibn el-Balad. See Armbrust, Chapter 5 titled “Classic, Clunker, National Narrative,” from Mass
Culture and Modernism in Egypt (1996).

1
The year 2005 saw a seldom-matched level of media coverage around one public figure,
Ahmed Zaki. As Zaki ‘s diagnosis of cancer was publicized, day to day coverage monitored his
worsening health condition, alongside daily updates of the film project he started during his illness
and worked on until his death. The footage he left behind form the bulk of Halim (2006), a biopic
of an indelible Egyptian icon, the “dark-skin coroner” Abd-el Halim Hafez. In 1977, Hafez’s
funeral was spoken of as one of the nation’s most mobilizing public events, as it was attended by
millions of mourners and was even rumored to include the public suicides of adoring fans. While
Zaki's funeral was speculated to have magnanimous scale, it was surprisingly concluded within
minutes and intentionally dispersed as a space of mass public gathering. The funeral was attended
by an unusual number of security brigades, who preemptively circumvented the procession. Upon
the Flag-enshrined body’s entry onto a public road, some security forces began to disperse the
unilateral procession of the mourning crowds, while others immediately circumvented the body
into a police van and sped off (Muharram 14-25).
This abrupt denial of mass public mourning with military force, coupled by the
unprecedented magnitude of the media’s coverage, signals the public memory of Zaki’s death as
a site of powerful political struggle that is significantly negotiated through images, both still and
moving. They are discursive images on a vast public scale, a reel of publicly contested edits to a
shared lexicon of citizenship ideals and ends, trials and disappointments, inscribed through Zaki's
performative body. These edits consolidate a range of mechanisms through which the body of the
“citizen," especially a masculinized citizen, works with(in) the script of day-to-day governance.
The latter usually involves the joint authorship of macabre militarism and carnivalesque
capitalism, parodied from one film to another through various characters and contextually
archetypal dilemmas in relation to which Zaki's leading role serves as some sort of model. This
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essay constructs a possible “narrative reel” of publicly co-authored pedagogies of masculinized
citizenship through select visual performances of Ahmed Zaki’s career. These pedagogies create
a possible discursive code for contending with the nationally-upheld binary regime of a co-
dependent, permeable link between materialist globalization and military discipline. Moreover, as
pedagogies of participatory contention and mediation that inhabit films intended for mass
distribution, visualities of Ahmed Zaki provide an exemplary link to mass mobilization that does
not necessarily inhabit a “revolutionary" rubric, as is often the fetishizing effect of eliding multiple
forms of public inhabitance, and the resulting politicization of public space, as lying outside of or
lesser than the highly visual years of the January 25, 2011 Revolution. Therefore, there are
multiple, historically distinct yet intersecting visual mechanisms for how coercive citizenry and
public struggles for visibility are simultaneously mediated in Egypt, mechanisms that interrupt,
continue, and contextually edit one another.
As an actor, Ahmed Zaki is usually respected as a Promethean performer, hence his many
appellations. However, the artistic category of "role" proves too insular and insufficient as a unit
of analysis to address a political and performative theory of audience-mediated authorship within
historically-implicated images. Instead, Zaki’s films are here viewed through the gesturally
malleable constructs of will and willfulness, as described by Sara Ahmed in Willful Subjects.4
Looking at national(ist) citizenship, raced masculinity, and anti-military public assembly as ways
through which “styles of willfulness” draw their political itineraries, this paper will describe three

4 Following is a brief genealogy from Ahmed’s book: assuming that “will” signifies a teleological vector of action, a
“straightening device,” that also assumes a morality of “doing good” (7, 12), Ahmed describes willfulness as a
“queer history of will” (7). In other words, willfullness is anti-will: a reclamation of one's will within, and
oftentimes despite, the larger hegemonic grounds of its very dismissal (Ahmed 134). Willfulness produces a
different kind of historicity, forged through an itinerary of its many “styles”: abrupt pauses; unhappy exclamations;
silent refusals; mid-march swerves; and gestures of stubbornness, persistence, and disobedience (2-12).

3