He Could Barely Mutter Habibi, My Beloved

by Mohammad Soueid

First published in Mulhaq al-Nahar in April 2005, translated and reproduced with permission from the author.

Cairo– «God help him», the taxi driver sighed, hearing the news that Ahmed Zaki had lapsed into an irreversible coma. We were traversing the city streets in his socialist manufactured Lada, as old as the reign of Leonid Brezhnev or whoever preceded Gorbachev, the king of perestroïka who like Farid Shawqi, was the king of terso, Cairo's third-rate movie theatres.

The car cut through streets jammed with pedestrians, chariots and pack animals, stacked under bridges, suspended in air constipated with pollution. I was in Cairo. I had landed a couple of weeks earlier, right as a breaking news dispatched on one of the satellite television stations reported that Ahmed Zaki’s condition had become critical; the Egyptian movie star was wrestling death, his doctors had lost hope. The report scrolled by on the ticker tape of the morning news, crammed in amongst dispatches on the Arab League summit in Algiers which a third of Arab leaders had refrained from attending, on the expected return of the Jordanian ambassador to Iraq, and on a bomb placed in the Kalisk area of greater Beirut by a suspect identified as “a thug.” With self-confident aplomb, the taxi driver assured me the “rayess” (president) would not think twice about cutting short his visit to Algeria to return home if Ahmed Zaki were to expire and meet his maker. In the same breath he hastened to mutter, «God protect him.» His conversation then veered to complaint, with a tone charged with pain, as he lamented his own destitution, misery and despair at failing to provide his wife appropriate treatment for an illness in her blood cells.

More often than not, Egypt's cinema superstars mirror the country's people, those civil servants, professionals, public transport conductors and passengers whose adulation they have claimed. I have always suspected that the emotional drive of these actors drew its intensity from the smoldering asphalt of sweltering streets, stifling air, jammed traffic, and seething bodies. Take Negib Mahfouz's fear of airplanes and air travel, and his remarkable rootedness in his city—it mirrors that singular trait amongst Egyptians in their attachment to the ground, their land. Therein lies the strength of tradition in Egyptian cinema: in its essence, it has always grounded itself in the land and its people. Without ambiguity, Ahmed Zaki was a ‘grounded,’ ‘earthbound’ actor, as was Souad Hosni, his partner in the television series Huwa Wa Hiya (He and She), in the drama fiction feature, Maw‘ed ‘Ala al-‘Asha’ (A Dinner Date)—he even chose her to be his neighbor in his final place of rest, requesting he be buried by her side. Both hailed from the lineage of earthly actors ground by the tumult of temperament, swings of mood, and intense sentimentality. He also hailed from the village next door to Abdel-Halim's native home, in the province of al-Sharqiyyah. Born from the banks of that small town known as al-Zaqazeeq, the façade of his romantic disposition as the city's son never completely obscured the poor peasant boy within him.

They say it was inspiration from Abdel-Halim’s tireless struggle with bilharziasis (schistosomiasis) that drove him to end his life with the film Halim, the day he learned he would not overpower his cancer. His return to the story of the “Dark Nightingale” was perhaps more correctly a desire to visit, one last time, the birth place of the boy from al-Zaqazeeq and the destiny of that Sharqawi peasant, a man from its earth and the long journey he traveled. In that unfinished film, he accomplished what those passionate about acting yearn for most deeply: to die on stage. According to someone on the set of Halim, the last scene he shot was a live concert scene where Abdel-Halim was onstage. The doctor accompanying him on the set advised him to take long breaks during the sequences of rendering songs, because he had just endured tenuous phases in the treatment where one of his lungs had been removed, and singing causes strain and constriction of blood vessels. He did not follow his doctor's advice. Surely, his insistence on playing the role hastened his demise. He exhausted himself. He tried to condense hours of shooting to finish his part in the fastest time possible. He could not stand in front of the camera for longer than two weeks. I lived his performance until the end. He had a stroke. His strength wilted. He could barely mutter «Habibi» to a friend who watched him pained when he could not get even climb into the car by himself. At the hospital, stroke followed stroke, until his brain fell silent. Before he was pulled into a coma, his memory had remained sharp. He had asked the man in charge of costumes if he had completed Abdel-Halim's suit from the 1950s, and fell to sleep.

«Asmar ya-smarani» (Oh dark one), muttered the driver of the Lada, sorrowful. His hoarse voice echoed the miseries and betrayals of fate. I was reminded of Abdel-Halim, his melancholy resurrected in the film Zawgat Ragol Mohemm (The Wife of an Important Man), in which Zaki delivered one his best performances alongside Mirvat Amin under the direction of Mohammad Khan. True, the character of the wife, emotionally frustrated, captive to the unrequited sentimentality of songs like “Ahwak”, and “Ana Lak ‘Ala Tool” rendered her closer to the persona of Abdel-Halim. But it is really the character of the husband, that harshness of the security officer consumed with megalomania, brought to life by Zaki, that endowed Abdel-Halim's sentimentality with its tragic underpinnings. He embodied a husband who was unable to save himself from his own downfall. The difference between Ahmed and Halim is the fine line between a wounding gentleness and the transparency of harshness.

Before the release of Zawgat Ragol Mohemm in 1988, Mohammad Khan introduced me to Ahmed Zaki because I wanted to interview him. The assistants on the set warned me against his bilious mood. Indeed, he seemed anxious and regarded me with indifference when I asked for an appointment after he finished working. He walked past me and straight on to follow-up on preparations for shooting the next scene as if he had not even heard my question. I was about to give up when a few minutes later, to my great surprise, he expressed his willingness to record the interview right there and then, on the spot. Even now I do not know whether he answered my questions genuinely, or if he wanted to hear something to practice dialogue, readying himself for the shoot.

His peers testify that watching him onscreen was a far more pleasant experience than working alongside him. He did not respect boundaries; he inhabited roles wholly and injected their upheavals into the living environment around him. Colossal actors are known to slip into the skin of the characters they portray and fold them into themselves. Ahmed Zaki transgressed even the boundaries of the self, and did not refrain from pulling everyone on set into the tribulations he experienced. At once fragile, for the haste with which he drove himself to ruin, and hard, for the intensity of his savagery, he was never merciful to himself or those around him. But he was also genuinely capable of extreme tenderness. Such paradoxes of character he interiorized as secrets; from his humble origins as a peasant from al-Sharqiyyah, he could never display malice without exposing another, more gentle side of himself.

When I remember him in his most enchanting moments on screen, I can never recall the delivery of a particular line of dialogue, or the extreme malleability of his body in the portrayal of the myriad roles. Rather, what grips me are the stolen seconds of a particular charge in his gaze. Rarely has an actor delivered to the lens of a camera a gaze that mercy from the hearts of spectators infusing tenderness into harshness, conveying charm and agreableness. With the unique power in his gaze, Ahmed Zaki forged a noble authenticity in his characters, such as in Khayri Beshara's al-‘Awwama Sabe‘en (Houseboat 70), Youssef Chahine's Iskanderiyyah Leyh? (Alexandria, Why?), Ra’afat el-Mihi's ‘Uyun La Tanam (Eyes that Don't Sleep), ‘Atef el-Tayyeb's al-Baree’ (The Innocent), and Mohammad Khan's Ahlam Hind Wa Camilia (Dreams of Hind and Camilia). With that gaze he turned Abdel-Nasser into the scion of the century, and transformed Anwar el-Sadat from a historical figure shrouded in controversy into a personage, on screen, that beckoned legitimacy. With Nasser 56 (Mohammad Fadel), Ayyam al-Sadat (Days of Sadat, Mohammad Khan) and Halim (Sherif ‘Arafa), it seemed as if Zaki wished to return to one of his oldest hobbies—the art of impersonation and mimicry. The “mushshakhasati,” or impersonator, was the traditional understanding of the art of acting as perceived by the Egyptian press in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Yet, something had changed. When Zaki graduated from the Institute for Dramatic Arts and was cast in stageplays like Madrasat al-Mushaghibeen (The School of Troublemakers), Awladana Fi London (Our Children in London) and al-‘Eyal Kebret (Children Have Grown), the roles failed to satisfy him, until he worked in film. At that time, Robert de Niro and Martin Scorcese headlined a new cinema in New York. In Cairo, Ahmed Zaki was the hero of a new cinema. He never forgot that Cairo was not New York. He was perhaps satiated with dreaming in the land of the Nile, with its traffic jams and polluted air. When rooted in solid ground, land is nothing other than a dream, even if gorged with sorrow.

As we passed through the Bab el-Louk neighborhood, I surrendered myself with abandon to a flow of recollections of Ahmed Zaki's voice rendering Sayyed Mekkawi's “Awqati Betehlaow.” It happened at a dinner party that had concluded a tedious day at the Cairo Film Festival. I could not figure out whether the dinner guests were genuinely interested in hearing his singing or simply sitting in his vicinity and marveling at his gait. His presence was enchanting and his singing unique, amidst that crowd of anonymous guests, who were acquainted with him almost exclusively on the screen. At the height of his rendition, his dark complexion melted in the shadows of dim lighting, his features obscured. From within the intimacy of that warm night and his somber bearing, his eyes obliterated the cloak of blackness, shining brightly, giddy from the pleasure of singing. He could barely mutter «Habibi». «May God be merciful with his soul», I whispered to the ears of the Lada driver, and went my way.

Mohammad Soueid is a Lebanese filmmaker, novelist and critic, working and living in Beirut, Lebanon.