Thanks, But No Thanks - Why Amie Sultan Can Keep Her Belly Dance Revival
When CairoScene released its interview with Amie Sultan on the 28th of December, it sent ripples of controversy through the belly dance community. Featuring a video drenched in instagram aesthetics of Sultan tying up her ballet shoes in a softly lit, stately oak room and generally faffing about in a lot of tulle and upscale clothes (and, tellingly, no belly dance costumes) set to a tinkling piano score, it was made painfully clear that Sultan's belly dance revival didn't feature much of any belly dancing at all. Not only did Sultan completely fail to seize her opportunity to show Egypt and the world that belly dance is so much more than "eww", she actually reinforced its place at the bottom of the sleazy scale. But the implications of Sultan's interview are more far reaching than the reputation of belly dance; her reliance upon bnary oppositions drags all women, especially Egyptian women of less privileged classes, firmly through the dirt.
During the interview, there are many glaring binaries, or extreme opposites into which women are organised with no room for a middle ground, drawn by both Sultan and the author, Amy Mowafi. Ballet is good, Â belly dance is bad. Foreign is good and Egyptian is bad (âall we see here [in Egypt] is...what we see hereâ). And good women feature the above two positive characteristics, and all Other belly dancing Egyptians are sex tape wielding walking boobs. As a belly dancing Egyptian herself, it seems a self-defeating mission to scandalise Egyptian belly dancers even more than they already are. She may think that drawing these binaries in her favour carries her far away from the negative end of the Egyptian belly dance spectrum. She goes to great lengths to distance herself, stating with pride that she doesn't "actually have any personal contact with other Egyptian belly dancers". But it is only a matter of time before her ballet background, "American accent," foreign travel and enviable wealth no longer prevent her from tumbling spectacularly into the bad girl spectrum.
This is what a belly dance revival looks like? Photography by Lobna Derbala
And so is the nature of oversimplified, oppositional binary structures; within them, we all lose (eventually). Â A system that categorises all women into "good" and "bad" , âpureâ and âdirtyâ, leaves no room for the true complexity of women and their lives to be understood. Take, for example, the Dina sex tape that Sultan and Mowafi discuss almost obsessively. Amie states that the decision not to make a sex tape is with her in the back of her mind with "every single step I take" to which Mowafi replies "it should be a general rule of life: don't make a fucking sex tape!" They never explicitly name names, but are quite obviously referencing Dina's sex tape scandal of 2003. In this particular dialogue, Dina, a woman that Amie later claims as her only connection to the Egyptian belly dance world and her "mentor", is shamelessly paraded as the touchstone fallen woman. Dina's big breasted, "vulgar", sex tape sexuality is held up in direct opposition to the doll like, pure, small breasted Sultan. But there is one highly disturbing problem with this parallelism, and that is, Dina didn't actually make a sex tape at all. Dina has publicly stated that the sex tape was made without her knowledge; if this account of events is to be believed then a victim of extreme sexual violence and violation is being publicly shamed yet again, over thirteen years after the incident. If Miss Sultan's self proclaimed mentor is open slather for such public humiliation, then the belly dancers of Cairo should consider themselves lucky that Amie doesn't particularly want to be friends.
However, Sultan is not alone in her actions. Slut shaming is nothing new for the belly dance community at large, as an incident involving Beyonce and a rather ill researched remix of Om Kalthoum's Enta Omri recently demonstrated. The resurgence of the footage from Beyonce's 2014 "On the Run" tour could have opened a much needed discussion about cultural appropriation within our belly dance community. Instead, most people just talked about how slutty Beyonce and her dance crew appeared. Instead of facing up to the huge ignorance of Egyptian music, dance and culture that continues to permeate our community, we demanded Beyonce's blood for offending us so badly. For dirtying our dance. We could have taken the opportunity to deal with our own shortcomings; instead we drew good girl/bad girl lines in the sand. That mostly white belly dancers were so vehemently vilifying an artist of colour despite our many incidents of cultural appropriation is not even a little surprising. Holding the opinion that Enta Omri is primarily a belly dancer's song and not an important piece of Egyptian art, history and culture is far more offensive than any sexy dance.
Foreign vs Egyptian, West vs East, Good Girl vs Bad. These are the binary oppositions that Amie relies on to rise above the dirt in the industry as opposed to taking on the more radical, and vastly more difficult task of questioning the industry itself. But there is one more element to Amie's escape from the negative impact of binary thinking that is flaunted and at the same time completely unexamined in the interview: wealth. With an apartment in Zamalek, Cairo's most affluent suburb, international travel, private lessons with the biggest names in the industry and "classy" custom made costumes, it is made painfully clear that Amie Sultan is one very rich girl. Sultan clearly has the resources to choose to "play the game her own way"; most other Egyptian belly dancers do not have this luxury. Many dancers I met in Egypt were working to support children, husbands, elderly parents.They live fully realised lives, have dreams and aspirations both within the dance form, and outside of it. Maybe if Sultan would take the time to get to know the others in her community, she would see that Egyptian belly dancers already are "so much more than the size of their boobs".
Attempting to sanitise belly dance with ballet (a strategy that is neither new nor unique, but has in fact played a prominent role in the development of the art form since the early 20th Century) does nothing to challenge Colonial ideologies of the exotic, hyper-sexual and primitive East or the misogynistic categorisation of all women into "good" and "fallen." In relying on these binaries to distinguish herself from the âdirtyâ side of belly dance, Sultan reinforces these racist and sexist norms. This interview could have been a platform to discuss the highly damaging prevalence of sexism and racism in the industry, to call out and demand more from the managers who book belly dancers for hotels, boats and clubs alike, and challenge with the aim of overthrowing negative attitude towards belly dancers in Egypt and throughout the world. Instead, the same old tired âusâ vs âthemâ narrative was regurgitated up in a nice new, pretty ballerina package. If your belly dance revival is based on slut shaming, disavowal and exclusion, then you can go ahead and keep it to yourself.
