Yahia Saleh Fatima Emam Mayada Madbouly
On Monday, July 15th, 2024, the Orfalea Center hosted a webinar entitled “A Matriarchal Memory and a Patriarchal Reality: The Place of Gender in Nubian Memory and Post-Displacement in Present-Day Egypt.” Nubia is often viewed as an extinct, glorious civilization in an extravagant Black world. Today, Nubian communities are divided between Egypt and Sudan, with the Egyptian Nubians scattered across displacement villages in Aswan and other urban centers, characterized by a sense of displacement and diaspora fueled by collective memory and imagination of the past. The webinar explored the complexity of Nubian collective memory and the role of gender within it. Mayada Madbouly, Fatma Emam, and Yahia Saleh discussed how modern Nubians imagine and narrate their past, focusing on matriarchy and its impact on contemporary communities. They analyzed the importance of these narratives for Nubian identity in a highly politicized, marginalized, and patriarchal context and how historical matriarchy narratives can be manipulated, appropriated, or perpetuated to support a patriarchal social structure. Mayada Madbouly is a Nubian-Egyptian feminist researcher. Fatma Emam is an assistant professor in humanities at the University of Groningen, Netherlands, and Yahia Saleh is a Nubian Egyptian memory and identity researcher and activist engaged in issues concerning ethnic minorities, queer identities, and political participation.
The Importance of Talking about Gender in Nubian Memory
The need for intersectional conversations about gender and race in Egyptian society and the wider Middle East and North Africa is urgent. Why is it important to discuss gender when addressing Nubian memory? According to Yahia Saleh, “there is a misconception of uniformity among Egyptians.”
It is essential, Yahia explained, to challenge the narrative of Egyptian women as a monolithic population of middle-class women born and raised in Cairo. He told us that Nubians have always been relegated to the background as past cultural or heritage objects that have not developed since the 1960s or earlier. Today, neither Nubians nor wider Egyptian society fully acknowledge the impact of displacement on Nubian identity and the impact of changes that Nubians have been subjected to after displacement. The mass displacement of Nubians within Egypt forced them to reshape and recreate their identities and societies in places other than Aswan, Nubia, or the displacement villages, so how has this played out? From his research, Yahia asserted that “it’s clear that memory plays the largest role in Nubian identity today.” Many Nubians base their identity on stories and images passed down from a past they never experienced.
Setting the theme for the webinar, Yahia put forward a series of questions. “How do we relate to this romantic image of Nubia? How do we think of ourselves as part of it? What parts of this image do we choose to recreate, and what do we choose to forget? These questions make today's discussion crucial: Do we remember Nubia as it truly was, as we think it was, or as we want it to be? This remembering will be the central theme of our discussion, focusing on whether Nubia was a matriarchy or if this is just an idealized notion of the past. Has Nubia ever truly been a matriarchy, or has it transformed into a patriarchal society over time?” As Yahia further explained, related to this is a paradox of the contemporary age for Nubians in Egypt. On the one hand, many Nubians will claim that women occupy a more empowered place in society compared to the rest of Egypt, yet how they dress or behave is scrutinized. How can we reconcile the contradiction of pride in a matriarchal past with a reluctance to embrace that matriarchy in the present?
Nubia as a Linear Matriarchy
Is it clear-cut to talk about Nubia as a matriarchy? Fatma offered the concept of a “Linear Matriarchy”: the appearance of a matriarch in place due to the lack of men in these Nubian geographies. However, this appearance is due to men working in the urban centers and other cities, such as Cairo and Alexandria; male domination persists, albeit through the woman as a tool. As stated by Fatma, “In a matriarchy, there would be no Female Genital Mutilation or child marriage.” Nubian women have been subjected to a dominant notion in society that the man should leave the villages to work in the cities and the woman should be left to be a mother, a farmer, a carpenter, or a merchant. The woman, however, did not choose this role, as stated by Fatima. “In the end, the money is the money of the man. The house is the house of the man. The children are the children of the man. They didn't choose. So it wasn't a matriarchy,” concluded Fatma.
Knowledge Production and Social Images of Nubian Women
Fatma’s talk led to discussions of knowledge production regarding Nubia. Mayada Madbouly talked about the representation of Nubian women in scholarly publications and focused on how knowledge production on Nubia generated stereotypes and, in most cases, culturalist images of Nubians. Going beyond cultural studies’ approach to analyzing images and stereotypes in popular media and focusing on narratives in books published in English and Arabic, Madbouly argued that while these works deal with Nubian women as reservoirs of memory and heritage, they generate gender stereotypes and folkloric images.
Mayada discussed the category of gender in relation to the question of representation, generally speaking. How are Nubian women, as a whole, represented? Searching through various materials and collections, Mayada found distinct social images that portray Nubian women in the 20th and 21st centuries. They are firstly “seen as memory agents, in the sense that they are reservoirs of memory, a reservoir of culture, a reservoir of traditions, and, of course, the language itself,” said Madbouly. They are seen as the ones who transmit Nubian culture and languages, specifically during the different waves of masculine labor migrations before and after the different forced displacements.
This is a discussion on knowledge production: how epistemic and epistemological labor has contributed to forming particular social images about Nubian women that are often used and reused within patriarchal discourses. From the French and English literature publications of orientalist travelers to more traditional field scholarship in the 1960s, to the various photographs and ridiculous captions regarding the clothing and aesthetics of Nubian women, Madbouly argued that “these different images play a crucial role in enriching the patriarchal society.” Rather than focusing solely on patriarchal society, it is essential, then, to emphasize the epistemic labor behind the institution of patriarchy.
Nubian Masculinity and the Public/Private Gender Divide
Yahia gave insight into the “double-life” that Nubian men lived between cities they were forced to migrate to, such as Cairo or Alexandria, and their life in Nubia, according to his investigations of Nubian literature, mainly written by men. This migration created a struggle. Specifically, Yahia highlights how Nubian men have been caught between their relationships with Northern Egyptian women (often perceived as "white" in contrast to Nubians) and their ties to Nubian women back in their hometowns. This division led to a sense of living a "double life," where Nubian men developed distinct identities—one shaped by their interactions in Cairo and another by their obligations and connections back in Nubia.
The struggle extended to gender roles, with Nubian men facing pressures to conform to the dominant norms of Egyptian masculinity: presenting themselves one way in Cairo and another in Nubia. However, after returning to Nubia, they often lacked the same societal power and influence due to their limited involvement in day-to-day life – a dynamic that evolved to create a new struggle, according to Yahia. “How can we be part of this new society while keeping our [Nubian] identity?” To that point, what aspects of their culture did they want to retain, and which ones did they want to adapt? These became central questions.
This shift created internal conflicts for Nubian men, who aspired to feel as masculine and socially authoritative as their Egyptian counterparts while also dealing with the expectations of traditional Nubian values. Moreover, Nubian women’s roles as cultural transmitters—teaching language and music—further complicated this division. “So the division between Nubian and Egyptian women was not sustained, but a division between Nubian men in the public sphere and Nubian women in the private sphere was created,” said Yahia. This disjunction led to a gendered hierarchy within the Nubian community, reinforcing the idea that Nubian women were caretakers of culture, while men represented the community in external spheres.
Some would argue that this brand of masculinity has been imposed on Nubian men. Even when some Nubians came to Cairo with relative wealth or educational backgrounds, they faced intense racism and marginalization, and were relegated to lower social positions due to their ethnicity and origins in the marginalized southern regions. This situation shaped Nubian masculinity, pushing men to adapt to a role and status that was not entirely self-defined but imposed by societal structures and historical circumstances following their displacement.
A Gendered Displacement?
The conversation between Yahia, Mayada, and Fatma explored how the displacement of Nubians was not a uniform experience but rather a gendered one that affected men and women differently. Yahia initiated the discussion by questioning whether the displacement in 1964, along with previous waves of migration, was influenced by gender dynamics. Mayada supported this inquiry by reflecting on Nubian literature, particularly the works of Yahya Mukhtar, which reveal how male experiences of displacement and migration to northern cities like Cairo have been historically prioritized. She noted that the first and second generations of Nubian writers were mostly men, who focused on young boys migrating north at an early age and left women behind to maintain traditional roles in the village. This pattern solidified gendered roles and narratives within the community, illustrating how the male migration experience became central to Nubian memory.
Fatma highlighted how women were marginalized during and after displacement, recalling how Nubian women, although actively participating in household and community responsibilities during displacement, were excluded from formal negotiations with the Egyptian state. The absence of male heads of households, many of whom were working in cities like Cairo, led to an "absentee" status that diminished women’s rights to land and property in their villages. This exclusion, Fatma argued, perpetuated a gendered hierarchy despite the critical role women played. She pointed out that while women helped prepare for displacement, the decisions and leadership remained firmly in the hands of men. This exclusion created a dichotomy where Nubian women’s contributions were acknowledged only in cultural aesthetics—like traditional clothing and jewelry—rather than in decision-making processes.
Yahia concluded by connecting these reflections to the present, emphasizing that the romanticized image of a Nubian matriarchal past is often used to obscure the ongoing patriarchal realities. He argued that the "museumization" of Nubia allows men, the state, and the community to pick and choose which parts of Nubian heritage to present while sidelining women’s voices. He noted that recent labor migration to the Gulf states in the 1970s and 1980s replicated older patterns, with men leaving their families behind and women shouldering the responsibility of maintaining cultural continuity. This, Yahia suggested, creates a paradox where Nubian women are idealized as the preservers of culture yet are marginalized in political and social spaces. The speakers collectively emphasized the need to rethink Nubian memory and representation, challenging both patriarchal narratives and the essentialization of Nubian identity.
➔ To watch the full webinar, click on the following video:
Comments