An actor takes off his shirt during Issam Mahfouz’s “Nakedness”.
This week my friend Diana invited me to see a play written by her brother, Issam Mahfouz, a leftist playwright who died several years ago. Its title was “Nakedness”. I had to look that word up in the Arabic dictionary and I only caught the odd line of the play. This both depressed and encouraged me by driving home that I have a long way to go in mastering this language, at the same time reminding me it is really just a matter of exposure that will determine my eventual success.
Before the play started, a young Frenchman from my class asked me the difference between “nakedness” and “nudity” in English. I told him that “nakedness” was simply the state of being without clothes whereas “nudity” implies the presence of a fetishizing eye. Western art, of course, is filled with nudes, almost invariably female. As my classmate went back to his seat, a young woman wearing an hijab turned to me and said, “I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation. My favorite painting in the whole world is Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus”. Do you think it is a nude?” So, we discussed the painting and we both decided that while Venus is beautifully naked she isn’t nude the way Manet’s “Olympia” is.
“Nakedness”, the play, was about a freethinking young woman and a man at the beginning stages of a secret police career being thrown together in a cell. They have to remove their clothing until the young woman renounces her freedom and accepts the totalitarian regime. It has echoes of Orwell but Orwell was writing against communism where Issam Mahfouz was writing the same thing as a communist. For the record, the actors didn’t get very far in their stripping.
A Lebanese who went a good deal farther in her stripping was the Lebanese ski champion Jacki Chamoun who posed for a photographer three years ago without much on apart from underpants and ski boots. The photographs surfaced during the Olympics and questions were raised in political circles whether she ought to be representing Lebanon at Sochi. Her supporters pushed back with a campaign called “I Am Not Naked” in which they had themselves photographed in the altogether except for a sign reading # Strip for Jacki. They said that their nakedness was to call attention to the truly serious issues facing Lebanon like the war next door in Syria.
Something about this claim didn’t sit quite right with me and I’ve finally figured it out. Certainly the war next door in Syria and its spillover into Lebanon are more pressing problems than who gets to represent Lebanon in the Olympics, yet the fact remains that this war, like all wars, is fought on a field of gender. Women, in this case with or without their hijabs, are loaded signifiers of group values and control. Downplaying indiscrete photographs isn’t disrupting male control of women’s bodies or the fetishizing male gaze that produces a genre of art called “The Nude” in one culture and an equally asymmetrical clothing of women in another. It’s just declaring sides.
When women can be naked without being nude it will be another world entirely, as beautiful as Botticelli’s Venus.
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