East West

Pygmalion and Abdel Halim Hafez

Dr..

Kamal Abdul Malik

August 12 2022

In our teenage years, we were a fan of listening to Abdel Halim Hafez's songs, especially the emotional songs that resonate with him about the pain of unrequited love, or about a girlfriend who refuses him and does not pay him enough attention.

In the movie “The Empty Pillow” (1957), Abdel Halim sings “Busy and Your Life.” Samiha, his beautiful lover (Lubna Abdel Aziz) is eager to see him and he responds by saying that he is busy.

If you're wondering why he's busy, he'll tell you later in the song that he's busy because he's on a date with her picture and gets ready to stand in front of the picture all night staring at her:

/ I have a date with a picture.. in the morning I stay up in front of her / I lived many nights.. hilarious with her words /

It seems that he prefers to stare at the image of a sweetheart instead of being with a beloved of flesh and blood, because the picture will preserve the beauty of the beloved and the tenderness of the beloved who will still look to him with her wonderful eyes and will not quarrel with him for any reason or blame him for any shortcoming:

/ And her sweet meaning you talk to me.. Not once do you think of quarreling with me / In the precious picture.. I'm busy../ Busy and your life goes on/

Abdel Wahab says in the song “I am afraid, I say what is in my heart” (1929): “I was visited by your shadow in my sleep before I loved you.

This tendency to prefer the image over the original, the spectrum over the body, and the ideal over the materialistic, is not limited to Arab culture. We also find it in Western mythology and literature, but in different forms and treatments.

A good example of this is the myth of Pygmalion and the literary works inspired by it.

Who is Pygmalion?

He is depicted in Greek mythology as a king and a sculptor, and presented to us by the Roman poet Ovid (d. 17 AD) in his poetic narration entitled The (Metamorphoses, translated by Tharwat Okasha, entitled “The Metamorphosis of Beings”), a sculptor who makes a statue of a woman and finds her so beautiful that it falls in her love.

Pygmalion kisses the statue and takes care of it, presents it with various gifts, and makes a luxurious bed for it.

With the passage of time, the feast of Venus, the goddess of beauty, came, and Pygmalion made sacrifices at her altar.

He was too afraid to admit that he wanted the ivory statue to come to life.

When he returned home he kissed his ivory statue and found that the ivory had lost its hardness.

Venus fulfilled Pygmalion's wish.

He married Pygmalion of the ivory statue, and they lived together and had a son and a daughter.

To Tawfiq al-Hakim, a play inspired by the Greek myth is “Pygmalion” (1940), which is an intellectual play about the conflict between life and art, a struggle between Galatia, the statue he made with his own hands, and Galatia, the wife whom Venus gave life, Galatia, the statue with her enduring beauty, and Galatia the wife with her kindness and mortal beauty, and Pygmalion bewildered. He cannot live with his beloved, nor see her sweeping the house with traces of age visible on her, and he asks Venus to return her as a statue.

The struggle here is between life with its imperfection and art with its completeness and its loftyness.

Abdel Halim ends his song with the idea of ​​a banner that prefers the image (corresponding to art) to his girlfriend Samiha / The original (opposite to life): / I am busy with you, Becky / And only you and your biography / My heart talks to me about you / And I talk about your image / And your imagination is always in my imagination / My love, oh My love dear /

"Busy about you, Becky"?

Isn't it strange that this obsession with the image and not the original?

With the spectrum of the beloved and not the beloved herself as a real human being, alive, breathing and agitated?

• The tendency to prefer the image over the original, the spectrum over the body, and the ideal over the materialistic is not limited to Arab culture.

Visiting Scholar at Harvard University

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