On the night of June 19, 1959, Inji Efflatoun stood alone on a Cairo street, attempting to hail a taxi. As a car finally pulled over, a group of men rushed her, seizing and forcing her into the vehicle. It was a sting. After months of living in hiding, disguising herself as a fellaha and flitting from house to house, the Egyptian painter and political activist had finally been arrested.
Efflatoun’s arrest marked a pivotal point. It signalled not only the beginning of her four-year imprisonment but a powerful new chapter in her artistic and political legacy. At Al Qanater Women’s Prison, Efflatoun produced some of her most renowned works – paintings that captured the resilience of the incarcerated women and the brutal intimacy of confinement. She also recorded her famous memoirs onto cassettes, which were later transcribed and shaped her posthumous image.
Though she recalled, in evocative detail, several phases of her life, it is her time behind bars that remains most closely associated with her name. But, as a new book reveals, Efflatoun’s legacy and life were too expansive to be confined to a prison cell.
The Life and Work of Inji Efflatoun is a project by the Barjeel Art Foundation, co-published with Skira. It is edited by Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi and Suheyla Takesh, who are the foundation’s founder and director, respectively.
The book presents, for the first time, an English translation of Efflatoun’s memoir. The memoir elucidates several of her key moments. They begin with her early life in the Shubra neighbourhood of Cairo and her time at the Sacred Heart School. They touch upon her early mentorship by Kamel el-Telmissany, from whom she learnt that painting meant “an honest expression of society and self”.
She speaks about her involvement in political groups advocating for women's rights and anti-colonialism. She expresses her heartbreak after the death of her husband Hamdi Aboul Ela, a prosecutor who shared Efflatoun’s political ideals and who probably died from injuries sustained during his arrest and torture. She narrates details of her arrest and how she managed to smuggle paintings out of prison.
In short, the memoir describes a person who relentlessly defied confinement, whether the bubble of aristocracy, the constraints of gender norms or the physical walls of a prison. It portrays someone as fierce in her art as she was in her politics. For Efflatoun, painting and activism were not separate pursuits but shadows cast by the same flame.
The memoir is translated from Arabic by Ahmed Gobba and Avery Gonzales, both former students of Al Qassemi at Yale University. He credits them with initiating the project.
“The book started when Ahmed wrote his final paper on Inji after he discovered that her family was from the same province of his grandfather,” Al Qassemi says. “But her family were the landowners, and his family were the workers. And so there was this interesting relationship that was happening.”
Gobba then proposed translating Efflatoun’s memoir into English and began working with Gonzales. “Initially, we were only going to publish the diary,” Al Qassemi says. The memoir is substantial, taking up a third of the 320-page book, and it is easy to see why it became popular when it was first published in 1993, four years after her death.
“Inji’s life is fascinating,” Al Qassemi says. “She came from an elite background and ended up forsaking all that privilege, choosing to be an activist, to stand up for the rights of the less privileged. She related to people who she fought for. There is no surprise that her book became quite popular, and that she's more known than other artists of her generation.”
“It started as a smaller project,” Takesh adds. “Then we thought to commission one or two new essays on Inji’s life and work to complement the memoir. One thing led to another, we kept discovering people’s research, and eventually we ended up with nine new essays.”
The essays explore the many facets of Efflatoun’s extraordinary life. They examine her fearless activism and how her art served as both a personal outlet and a political expression, often reflecting the intensity of her struggles and convictions. Several essays consider her prescient sensibilities, as well as her active engagement with international networks of solidarity. The essays also touch upon her ties with the Soviet Union and her affinity with Mexican artists, particularly David Alfaro Siqueiros. Her exhibitions are portrayed not just as artistic milestones, but as acts of diplomacy that extended her reach far beyond Egypt.
Efflatoun’s personal life also finds its way into these essays. They trace the transformative nature of her marriage to Aboul Ela, a union that deeply impacted her, even as it ended in tragedy. Equally moving is her determined effort to learn Arabic – having been educated in French – which is framed as emblematic of her drive to connect with the fabric of everyday Egyptian life.
“We are also republishing three existing texts,” Takesh says. “Two of them have been translated from Arabic. One of those is actually authored by Inji herself in 1972 as part of her participation in a conference in Tunis. The paper is about Egyptian modernist art, and she speaks about other people’s work such as Mahmoud Said and Mohamed Nagy. She also situated her own practice within that constellation.”
The book also features an essay by American artist Betty LaDuke, originally published in 1989.
Written after LaDuke visited Efflatoun in her Cairo studio in the late 1980s, the piece presents a broad stroke of the artist’s life before culminating with an interview that offers a rare, first-hand account of Efflatoun in her later years.
Beyond the essay, LaDuke played a key role in shaping the book’s visual narrative, contributing significantly to its rich collection of images. The Life and Work of Inji Efflatoun, in fact, draws from several private collections and institutional archives to present a vivid visual record of the artist’s life, featuring her paintings as well as rare archival photographs. It is, quite possibly, the most comprehensive publication of Efflatoun’s work to date, with high-resolution images that bring out the intricate details and textures of her paintings.
As a whole, the book seeks to do justice to a painter who has too often – and unfairly – been reduced to her years in prison.
“One thing we did is expand on the two-dimensionality of Inji,” Al Qassemi says. “Everything about Inji was about her arrest and time in jail. There were all these missing parts of her life.
“She spent four and a half years in jail, but she lived for many decades more than that. That’s why we called the book The Life and Work of Inji Efflatoun. We actually go into parts of her life that have been completely neglected before.”
Killing of Qassem Suleimani
The burning issue
The internal combustion engine is facing a watershed moment – major manufacturer Volvo is to stop producing petroleum-powered vehicles by 2021 and countries in Europe, including the UK, have vowed to ban their sale before 2040. The National takes a look at the story of one of the most successful technologies of the last 100 years and how it has impacted life in the UAE.
Read part four: an affection for classic cars lives on
Read part three: the age of the electric vehicle begins
Read part one: how cars came to the UAE
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Ziina users can donate to relief efforts in Beirut
Ziina users will be able to use the app to help relief efforts in Beirut, which has been left reeling after an August blast caused an estimated $15 billion in damage and left thousands homeless. Ziina has partnered with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to raise money for the Lebanese capital, co-founder Faisal Toukan says. “As of October 1, the UNHCR has the first certified badge on Ziina and is automatically part of user's top friends' list during this campaign. Users can now donate any amount to the Beirut relief with two clicks. The money raised will go towards rebuilding houses for the families that were impacted by the explosion.”
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How to play the stock market recovery in 2021?
If you are looking to build your long-term wealth in 2021 and beyond, the stock market is still the best place to do it as equities powered on despite the pandemic.
Investing in individual stocks is not for everyone and most private investors should stick to mutual funds and ETFs, but there are some thrilling opportunities for those who understand the risks.
Peter Garnry, head of equity strategy at Saxo Bank, says the 20 best-performing US and European stocks have delivered an average return year-to-date of 148 per cent, measured in local currency terms.
Online marketplace Etsy was the best performer with a return of 330.6 per cent, followed by communications software company Sinch (315.4 per cent), online supermarket HelloFresh (232.8 per cent) and fuel cells specialist NEL (191.7 per cent).
Mr Garnry says digital companies benefited from the lockdown, while green energy firms flew as efforts to combat climate change were ramped up, helped in part by the European Union’s green deal.
Electric car company Tesla would be on the list if it had been part of the S&P 500 Index, but it only joined on December 21. “Tesla has become one of the most valuable companies in the world this year as demand for electric vehicles has grown dramatically,” Mr Garnry says.
By contrast, the 20 worst-performing European stocks fell 54 per cent on average, with European banks hit by the economic fallout from the pandemic, while cruise liners and airline stocks suffered due to travel restrictions.
As demand for energy fell, the oil and gas industry had a tough year, too.
Mr Garnry says the biggest story this year was the “absolute crunch” in so-called value stocks, companies that trade at low valuations compared to their earnings and growth potential.
He says they are “heavily tilted towards financials, miners, energy, utilities and industrials, which have all been hit hard by the Covid-19 pandemic”. “The last year saw these cheap stocks become cheaper and expensive stocks have become more expensive.”
This has triggered excited talk about the “great value rotation” but Mr Garnry remains sceptical. “We need to see a breakout of interest rates combined with higher inflation before we join the crowd.”
Always remember that past performance is not a guarantee of future returns. Last year’s winners often turn out to be this year’s losers, and vice-versa.
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2.15pm: Maiden (PA) Dh40,000 1,200m
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3.45pm: Handicap (PA) Dh40,000 1,000m
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4.15pm: Sheikh Hamdan bin Rashid Cup Handicap (TB) Dh200,000 1,700m.
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54.45pm: Handicap (PA) Dh40,000 1,700m
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ABU DHABI CARD
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6.30pm: Sheikha Fatima bint Mubarak (IFAHR) Apprentice Championship (PA) Prestige; Dh100,000; 1,600m
7pm: Sheikha Fatima bint Mubarak (IFAHR) Ladies World Championship (PA) Prestige; Dh125,000; 1,600m
8pm: Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan Jewel Crown (PA) Group 1; Dh5,000,000; 1,600m
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Price, base: Dhs850,000
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• Increase defence spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2027 but given “turbulent times it may be necessary to go faster”
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• Invest in the resilience of military space systems.
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Started: October 2015 in India, November 2016 in UAE
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Killing of Qassem Suleimani
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• Supports military aid for Ukraine, unlike other eurosceptic leaders, but he will oppose its membership in western alliances.
• A nationalist, his campaign slogan was Poland First. "Let's help others, but let's take care of our own citizens first," he said on social media in April.
• Cultivates tough-guy image, posting videos of himself at shooting ranges and in boxing rings.
• Met Donald Trump at the White House and received his backing.
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