The elusive Arabic word ghurba speaks of exile, alienation and estrangement from home. In this essay, writer and curator Iskandar Abdalla locates the familiar sensation of ghurba in popular Egyptian cinema, through the stories of three tragic heroines. These narratives of reinvention, escape and longing transgress the boundaries of time and space – from demolished buildings in Alexandria to the wintry streets of Berlin.

Prologue: On Ghurba

Ghurba غربة is one of many Arabic words that are impossible to accurately translate. It conveys a polyphony of meanings and carries the weight of intricate and multifaceted histories. Estrangement might be its closest English equivalent. Ghurba could be paraphrased as the sum of the material and emotional conditions associated with being away from home. Exile is ghurba of a distinctive art. Perhaps it is the cruelest one because the condition of estrangement becomes so perpetual that it overshadows every future; almost an Ersatz-ontology that cannot be reversed or reshaped. Or perhaps the sense of permanency in exile—known in Arabic as manfā منفى—intensifies the condition of ghurba through the impossibilities it enforces: the determinacy of borders and legal papers, the totality of wars and genocides. These impossibilities can grow so overwhelming that they negate one of ghurba’s constitutive premises: the illusion of ephemerality, the promise of homecoming.

Perhaps ghurba itself ceases when you cease to long for closure, when you let go of your in-betweenness and recognize yourself as eternally banished, or as someone who has finally arrived. Whether you are exiled or not, it is said that you live in ghurba, or experience it, as soon as you move away from home. From this moment on, you become a stranger, a gharīb—another etymological relative of ghurba— wandering in alienation and wondered at for the peculiarity of your presence.If ghurba feels like alienation, it does so because time has fallen out of joint, and space no longer holds the solace of place. In ghurba, we lose ourselves because we lose the narrative, at least until we are able to forge it in ways that reconnect the past with the present, proximity with distance; until we are able to resurge from the ruins of loss and imagine our existence otherwise. 

I. Fathia: Al-Nadaha or For Whom the Wind Calls (1975)

Fathia (played by Egyptian film diva Magda al-Sabahi), the main character of Hussein Kamal’s film al-Nadaha or For Whom the Wind Calls (1975), is haunted by a specter. She is called upon by a mysterious power to leave her peaceful rural town on the banks of the Nile and move to Cairo. Al-Nadaha, whose name the film bears, is a mythical female figure in Egyptian folklore who resembles the Greek siren. She dwells in abandoned places along the shores of the Nile, near ditches or other water channels that shimmer in the dark. When she calls the name of her victim with her alluring voice, there is no turning back. One must answer the bewitching call, even at the cost of one’s own death or a final departure into nowhere. In Kamal’s film, we are never sure whether al-Nadaha truly exists, or whether her presence is merely a metaphor for a mightier spell that has taken hold over the lives of women and men, doing away with the alluring world of myths altogether, in Egypt and across the postcolonial South: secular modernity.

Fathia might seem like a victim of an evil destiny. In Cairo, she was promised the company of colors and lights, pleasure in many varieties, dazzling encounters, and the comfort of a modern life on the verge of defying suffering and poverty. But she soon found herself confined to a dark and humid room, at the bottom of the class line, with an ignorant husband who slurs and beats her. She is exposed daily to those who enjoy the fruits of modern life, yet remains incapable of becoming one of them, of belonging to their world. She finds herself living in ghurba. She ends up breaking her heart, losing her dignity, and relinquishing all her future dreams. 

But when, toward the end of the film, her husband urges her to return to where she came from—to leave the city that defiled her honor and shattered her life–she escapes from him, acknowledging that return is out of reach and out of the question. She seems to have chosen the very destiny that chose her, surrendering to its curses just as she once did to its temptations. Cairo put a spell on Fathia, but it is a spell that she herself invoked, through her insatiable curiosity and inflated ambitions.

I often think of Fathia as I contemplate my own journey to Berlin, the spell this city has cast over me, with all its shimmering allures and whispered promises, whether they turned out to be true, revealed themselves as lies, or were fated to become a devouring curse. Another word etymologically related to ghurba is istighrāb, which means something like bewilderment: a state of surprise that might also involve fascination. Is ghurba merely a destiny that often leaves no room for choice? Or can it also be a destiny that you choose at the very moment it chooses you? The language of choice seems incapable of offering a definitive answer. Yet a bewilderment tinged with fascination appears essential to the spell’s power, to the call that draws one forward, in stark contrast to the violence of abandoned homes. 

The history and present of migration from the South to the North, from “stagnated” margins to the supposed havens of progress, from the (ex-)colonies to the center of empire—what is now called “the West”—is both an effect and an instrument of secular modernity. For the non-West, the West¹ is both bewildering and fascinating, in ways that may provoke animosity and aversion. The call takes us by surprise, yet it also carries the promise of freedom and recognition, an allure that hails us to follow its direction and submit to its power. The loss is irreversible, to the extent that any return to a life that preceded it seems possible only by undoing one’s very self.

II. Faten: Ah Ya Leil Ya Zaman (1977)

“Where is the tenderness—where did it go?
Oh my heart, cry for tenderness!
What has happened to the world?
People are no longer who they once were.

Where are the sweet words?

Where are the sweet people?

You lost them, you wounded them, you kept them wandering in your labyrinth ..

Oh, our nights, our nights…
Once again, you have wandered off.
We have lost you, and you have lost us.
We thought we’d find a harbor to anchor in.

But here we are, alone, with no family, no company.
Here we are, and the world is a traitor.

It has betrayed us, just as it betrayed those before us.”

Faten—played by the Algerian diva Warda Al-Jazairia (1939–2012)—sings the above song while wandering the cold streets of Paris, a heavy bag in her hand. She has no money, no home, no place to go. I call this song the hymn of ghurba. I listen to it over and over as I walk the streets of Berlin, whether by day or night, in winter or summer, beneath a rainy sky or a sunlit one. Faten laments the fate of life in ghurba: the loneliness, the absence of the beloved, of kind words and familiar faces, the loss of tenderness and anchorage. She is lost in a world that feels strange to her, while the world she once knew, with its familiar faces and places, has abandoned her too. It is a vicious circle of loss, where one no longer knows what to reclaim, or who is left to do the redeeming.

I often catch myself on the verge of tears when Warda, in the role of Faten, raises her voice with ultimate melancholy, wondering where the “sweet people” and their “sweet words” have gone. Perhaps it is the masterfully woven composition by Baligh Hamdy (1932–1993), who knew how to evoke melancholy by moving poignantly through shifting Arabic melodic modes (maqāmāt). And perhaps it is the very virtue of kindness—what Faten gestures toward when she speaks of sweetness—that is most absent in ghurba. It is also the thing I long for most, even if I cannot accurately describe what it entails. Perhaps kindness can only unfold in a different world, one that allows for a living beyond calculated reason, beyond a singular temporality, beyond a pale and disenchanted reality that has forsaken dreams.

III. Nadia or Fawzyya? The Last Night (1963)

Away from home, time seems to split into two paths. One path marks our bodies, propelling us forward as we move on, aging along the way. The other is omnipresent: a territory harbored in memory. It does not unfold in sequence but remains sealed in dream-like images and sensual impressions that outshine every world we call real.  Does ghurba split us in two, replacing one way of being with another? Does it blur the boundaries between past and present, dream and reality, as it bifurcates the passage of time?

Al-Laila al-Akhira (The Last Night, 1963) by Kamal El Sheikh opens with Nadia—played by one of the greatest Egyptian actresses of all time, Faten Hamama (1931–2015)—lying in bed, about to wake up. With her eyes still closed, the voice-over draws us into her thoughts. Tonight, her long-awaited lover is finally set to return home to marry her. A dream is about to come true. But when she opens her eyes, she finds herself in a nightmare. It was 1942 when she went to bed; now it is 1957. She has aged fifteen years overnight. Yet the shock does not end there: Nadia wakes up not as herself, but as her sister, Fawzia–married to Fawzia’s husband and mother to a young woman whose wedding is taking place that very night. She is no longer in Alexandria, where she used to live, but in Cairo. “When did all this happen? Where was I? How long did I sleep? Or am I still sleeping?” she asks herself, before beginning a tiring journey in the quest for her lost true self. 

Living in ghurba is plagued by moments of uncertainty, when reality feels like a dream, and the truth of home survives only in vivid dreams. You might even begin to sound like someone else–someone similar to you, but not quite the same. You exist among others, speak to them, hear them, fall in love and are loved in return, yet a trace of doubt lingers: are you really present? And if so, is the one who is present truly you? Or have you lost yourself along with the home you’ve lost?

When Nadia visits her hometown, Alexandria, she becomes increasingly certain that she is Nadia, not Fawzia. She recognizes almost every street corner and every building, as if she had left them only yesterday. Familiar places affirm her identity. Her memories cannot betray her. Nearly fifteen years after I left Alexandria, when I return, I cannot even recognize the street I grew up on. My old school has been demolished. The playground has vanished. Even the sea is now hidden behind fences and cement blocks. My memories echo in the void. I lost myself in the ghurba, and in the meantime–or perhaps in a parallel temporal territory–home ceased to be home.

Epilogue

Has arrival slipped beyond reach? Did the promise of homecoming outlive its time? Perhaps. But the longing for it endures. Its possibilities may already be foreclosed, yet imagination can carve new openings–beyond the possible, beyond the real, beyond the sharp ruptures between home and ghurba, between past and present, between dream and reality.

One might fail to redeem loss, to make room for home in exile, to keep home suspended in time, to reconcile with one’s own “true” self. And yet in Fathia, in Faten, in Nadia or in Fawzia, both home and self can be imagined and reimagined, again and again, beyond the confines of time, body, and space—perhaps endlessly.

Iskandar Abdalla is a writer, curator, and educator born in Alexandria, Egypt, and based in Berlin. He studied history, film, and Middle Eastern studies and holds a PhD in Islamic Studies from the Free University of Berlin. He has published numerous contributions on topics including secularism and sexuality, film and memory, queer representations, and queer viewing practices in Arab cinema. He also serves as the Artistic Director of the Arab Film Festival Berlin (ALFILM).

1.  It is worth mentioning here that ghurba is derived from the Arabic root gharb, which means “West.”
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