A.Z. Abushady. Undated photograph, Washington, DC, ca. 1950s
Thanks to Esmat El-Halaby for sending along a copy of this article:
Jayyusi, Salma Khadra. 1981. “A Short Account of Abu Shadi’s Life in the United States,” Mundus Arabicus, Vol.1: Arab Writers in America: Critical Essays and Annotated Bibliography. Published by Dar Mahjar, Cambridge, Mass. pp.36-47.
Download Jayyusi -a short account of abu shadi's life in the united states - salma khadra jayyusi
By Marcia Lynx Qualey in Arabic Literature (in English) on August 26, 2013
Artist and writer Joy Garnett (@joygarnett) is working on a book about her grandfather, Ahmed Zaki Abushady, the Egyptian poet and bee scientist. She answered a few questions about AZ Abushady, his work, and her book project:
< AZ Abushady as a young man. 1909.
ArabLit: When did you first become interested in your grandfather’s life and work (in a serious way)? What role did family stories play? Can you describe your current book-project and what it will encompass?
Joy Garnett: The book is a family memoir and an adventure story – a love story – that focuses on Abushady’s life, his work as a poet and bee scientist, and his premature death in relative obscurity in the US. It’s not a biography in the conventional sense. I have an inside story to offer, told through family members and Abushady’s own voice. My discovery of an archive containing his letters and decades of correspondence was a pivotal moment. They reveal how his personal story is entangled with political and cultural conflicts played out from 1922 to 1946 in Egypt. Central to the story is the point of view of my aunt Safeya, the source of so much of this material. She is Abushady’s oldest daughter and the last living family link to that time. So, I am telling an idiosyncratic story partly through her, and in a way that I think anyone will relate to, whether or not they’re interested in Egypt. Specialists in Modern Arabic poetry and Egypt between the wars will, I hope, be interested as well.
I grew up hearing stories my mother told me about her childhood in Alexandria. Abushady loomed large, but his significance was related in broad strokes. It was all a bit vague and romantic. I was in college when I started to get a real sense of who my grandfather was. I started studying fusha at McGill’s Institute of Islamic studies and got into a conversation with an Egyptian classmate. She set me straight.
When I finally got to Egypt, it was on a student loan. I enrolled in the American University in Cairo’s summer language program. I was twenty. I made a point of looking for Abushady’s books and asking questions about him. I started to figure out who my family was. Once back at the Institute, I sought out critical articles about his poetry, but this was premature. The bulk of critical writing in English was still being written.
In my twenties, I stopped studying Arabic and Abushady altogether. I decided to pursue an art career instead. There was a point when I realized it was either him or me, and I had to make a choice. Many years passed where I barely thought about him, and then a few years ago I felt the pull. Even dead, Abushady is a force of Nature.
When my mother, aunt, and uncle started to grow old and sick, I was jolted back into thinking about this project. I taped interviews with them. I had a day job in a museum library that gave me free access to things like JSTOR and interlibrary loans. And of course, this time around I have the Internet.
I’ve spent the past couple of years traveling to different archives and doing research independently to try to piece together the many parts of Abushady’s life, which is not easy. As a physician, bacteriologist, beekeeper, agricultural and social reformer, poet and publisher, he defies categorization. I want to bring together what I’ve discovered about his main achievements in a single narrative. I would like to show the extent of his influence on Modern Arabic poetry as well as his impact on bee husbandry in England and Egypt. For him, poetry and bees were deeply interconnected. But of course, no one in Arabic literature circles knows much about his bee science contributions and vice versa. The connections are interesting.
AL: Does it get into other family history? For instance, your great-grandmother’s Cairo literary salons?
JG: There are some colorful characters in the extended family. My great-grandfather, Maitre Muhammed Abushady Bey, was a big lawyer and a pal of Sa’ad Zaghlul. Legend has it that he could get anyone off no matter how serious the offense. His milieu included many writers and poets who exerted an early influence on his young son. I’ve had difficulty extracting more than a few details from that earlier time. I’ve had better luck with the period following Abushady’s return to Egypt in 1922 after ten years living in England. A creative DIY urban scene greeted him, and he was perfectly suited for it. Our close cousins through my great-grandmother, Amina (née Nagib) were the painters and satirists Seif and Edham Wanly, who were integral to the Egyptian artist “scene” in Alexandria. They were part of my grandfather’s circle, which included poets, writers, journalists, cartoonists, calligraphers, painters, sculptors, composers, etc. The Wanly brothers provided illustrations and cartoons for Abushady’s various publications. Edham was very close with my aunt, and they exchanged letters regularly until his death in 1959.
There was also an evil stepmother, an atheist grifter, several instances of unrequited love and a string of tragic, youthful suicides. There are probably too many intrigues to include in one book.
I made an unexpected discovery concerning my grandmother, Abushady’s first wife, Annie. They met when he was a medical student in London, and she was English, of course. Her maiden name was Bamford. It turns out that she was descended from the radical labor organizer, Samuel Bamford, who was a poet in the Lancashire dialect. Her father was a member of the Oddfellows, a centuries-old mutual organization that presaged trade unions. So she came from a long line of radical working class poets who believed in things like financial support for working people and free healthcare for the poor. I believe Annie had a significant influence on Abushady’s vision for social reform. She may have provided the inspiration for his feminism. He was promoting women’s suffrage in Egypt in the 1930s! And he named his two daughters after Huda Sha’arawi and Safeya Zaghul. He actually wanted to institute the principles of England’s Co-operative Movement in Egypt, which shows his romantic, against-all-odds brand of idealism. He was a Wafdist like his father, and as a nationalist he wanted, of course, to see an end to the British occupation. So his Anglophilia was complex, if not conflicted.
Apollo’s Society, Cairo, ca. 1935. Back row standing, L to R: [?], Hasan Kamil al-Seyrafi, Abdel Ghani Hassan, A.Z. Abushady, Salih Jawdat, Ramzy Maftah. Seated: 'Ali Mahmud Taha, Zaki Mubarak. Sayyid Ibrahim.
My short article on Abushâdy and hybridity has been posted to Baraza, a meeting space for critical collaboration run by graduate students in the department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University:
Fig. 1: Original caricature of Abushâdy by M. Fridon (1928)
Cross-Pollination
I’ve spent the past few years organizing materials that were left behind by my late grandfather, Ahmed Zaky Abushâdy (1892-1955), the well-known Egyptian Romantic poet—and physician, inventor, and bee scientist. Early on in my research, I became aware of two distinct narratives in the biographical literature: Abushâdy the Romantic Poet and Abushâdy the Bee Scientist. The former narrative is enshrined in the field of Modern Arabic Literature, while the latter weaves between the history and science of beekeeping in 20th century England and Egypt. Each tells a story that portrays important aspects of Abushâdy’s life and work. But as I continue to examine the materials in the archive, it strikes me that the logic that gives rise to separate, non-intersecting narratives runs counter to the spirit of my grandfather, who dedicated his life to working across disciplines and bringing together a wide array of traditions and cultures.
One remedy may be to develop a new narrative that emphasizes the hybridization that shot through all of Abushâdy’s activities. As a scientist, he understood the concept of hybrid vigor in both theoretical and practical terms, bringing it to fruition by breeding honeybees on a grand scale. He also applied the concept as a poet, for instance, by welcoming the influences of European Modernism, particularly English poets such as Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, and Keats. Likewise, he developed his own brand of proto-multiculturalism in his academic writing on politics and social issues.
Central to all of Abushâdy’s activities was his role as publisher. In the early 1930s, he bought a used printing press, and started his cottage industry in private publishing. As publisher, editor, typesetter, and printer, Abushâdy promoted his own writings and those of his friends and associates. He called his publishing venture Maṭbaʻat al-Taʻāwun—“The Co-operation Press”—and he ran it singlehandedly for over a decade, first in Cairo and later when he moved his home base to Alexandria, where he continued to produce journals and monographs across far-flung disciplines. The press draws its name from the 19th century English co-operative movement, which Abushâdy learned about through his English paramour and wife-to-be, Annie Bamford, a self-described freemason descended from radical labor organizers and cotton weavers. “The Movement” provided him with practical strategies with which to launch co-operative societies and their associated publications.
Fig. 2: L: Cover of Apollo (February 1934); R: Apollo’s Society (1935)
Although Abushâdy produced two long-lived bee journals—the first, Bee World, founded in 1919 in Benson, England, remains in print to this day—he is remembered for his short-lived, controversial poetry journal Apollo (Jamʻīyat Apūllū), which he published in Cairo between 1932 and 1934, and whose influence persisted long after it ceased publication. Apollo provided a much-needed platform for experimentation at a moment when poets from across the Arab world were transforming Arabic poetry. Associated with Apollo was “Apollo’s Society,” a group of poets that spanned several generations, yet who shared a desire to modernize Arabic poetry, which they agreed had fallen into a decline. The Apollo poets carved out a position for themselves among the warring literary factions of the day (fig. 2).
In 1930, two years before the first issue of Apollo appeared, Abushâdy launched a second bee journal, The Bee Kingdom (Mamlakat al-naḥl, 1930-40), which attracted contributions in both Arabic and English and took in advertisements from around the world. He also founded an Egyptian bee organization called “The Bee Kingdom League,” which continued the educational and co-operative work he started a decade earlier in England. “Bee culture” had long since seeped into Abushâdy’s life and work, at once providing a literary metaphor and a model for his research.
The Bee Kingdom masthead by Paul Beer (Vol.2, no.12, December 1931)
Among the many visual emblems of hybridity that Abushâdy employed as a publisher is the illustration on the masthead of The Bee Kingdom. Created by an artist named Paul Beer (described on the back of one sketch as “al-Nimsawi”—The Austrian), it depicts a crowned queen bee astride a throne, her arms embracing the two hemispheres of the globe—East and West (Fig. 3). This logo appears on ephemera and objects in the archive, on variations of letterheads, in the form of gummed pyramid-shaped labels and enamel-inlaid medallions (Fig.4).
The variety of the illustrations contained in Abushâdy’s publications, as well as the artworks preserved in his archive, indicate an interchangeability of roles and the blurring of genres for artists working in Egypt in the 1930s and 40s. As I thumb through Apollo, I am struck by the eclectic nature of the illustrations, which include reproductions of fine drawings, caricatures, cartoons, and color plates. Likewise, in the pages of The Bee Kingdom, we find numerous small line drawings. When I first discovered these drawings, which are remarkably stylized, I assumed they were unsigned elements of graphic design produced by the same anonymous hand. On closer inspection, I found each piece to contain the minuscule signature of the celebrated Egyptian calligrapher Sayed Ibrahim (1897-1994) (Fig.5). Ibrahim was a member of Apollo’s Society, producing copious illustrations for Abushâdy’s many publications, including Apollo, as well as poetry.
Fig. 4: Top L: Cover of The Bee Kingdom (June 1930); Top R: Medallion, Mappin & Webb, Ltd. (London, n.d.); Bottom L: Sticker; Bottom R: Medallion (Egypt, n.d.)
Other well-known artists who contributed regularly to The Co-operation Press include the painter Mohamed Hassan (1892-1961), who doubled as a political cartoonist, and the brothers Seif Wanly (1906-1979) and Edham Wanly (1908-1959), who were Abushâdy’s close cousins in Alexandria. Like Hassan, the Wanly brothers were prolific painters as well as cartoonists (Fig. 6).
Fig. 5: Drawing by Sayed Ibrahim (n.d.)
Another frequent contributor was the self-taught painter Shaaban Zaky (1899-1968), who wrote articles for Apollo while advertising his services as a commercial artist in its back pages. This straddling of different styles and genres seems to have been commonplace, just as it was conventional for poets to also work as journalists.
I have come to realize my grandfather’s personal quest for hybridity was emblematic of his time, and the contents of his archive preserve for us a particular moment of experimentation and co-operation across mid-century Egyptian urban culture. Abushâdy’s hybridity is elegantly portrayed in a widely-reproduced caricature by the Alexandrian Persian cartoonist Mohamed Fridon (Ostle, 1994). It portrays Abushâdy at the top of his game: a many-armed human with a microscope for a body, grounded by his bare feet even as his mind takes off in several lofty directions at once (see figure 1, above). The portrait serves to remind us that neither poetry nor art nor science develops in isolation, and that creativity, harmony, and growth all thrive and benefit from cross-pollination.
Fig. 6: L: Gouache by Seif Wanly (1950); R: Cartoon by Edham Wanly (1945); Bottom: Atelier, Seif and Edham Wanly, colleagues (n.d.)
Joy Garnett is a multidisciplinary artist and writer who works with archives as both subject and medium.
Detail of photograph showing 60 Rue Menasce, Alexandria, Ahmed Zaky Abushady’s Egyptian Home and head-quarters of The Bee Kingdom League, circa 1937. Note "BKL" signs on etiher side of the gate. Photo courtesy the Abushady Archive.
My short article for Bee World, published by the International Bee Research Association, is now in print. Bee World is the bee science journal founded by my Egyptian grandfather, A.Z. Abushady, in 1919 when he was living in the English countryside outside Oxford. Bee World is still published, and last year I was invited by editor emeritus Richard Jones to offer its readership some Bee World history:
Joy Garnett: “Blazing the Trail: A.Z. Abushady and The Apis Club,” Bee World, Vol.91, no.3 (Sept 2014), International Bee Research Association (IBRA), Cardiff, Wales.
For more information about Abushady and the history of Bee World:
Bee World - A Phoenix Arises. The evolution of a beekeeping journal, by Karl Showler, Hay-on-Wye, Wales, UK (Bee World, Vol.87 (1) 2010, pp.2-4. Download Karl Showler BW 87 1 2-5
by Mostafa Heddaya in Hyperallergic on December 19, 2013
Dr. Ahmed Zaky Abushady (right) with wife, Anna Bamford, and children circa 1927 (all images via Joy Garnett on Flickr)
Ahmed Zaky Abushady was a polymath in the Victorian mold, a preeminent Egyptian literary figure, bee scientist, inventor, and physician who found pathways between modes of thought and scholarship long before “interdisciplinary” became an academic catchall. Though his life’s work has received wide-ranging honors (he’s even appeared on a commemorative Egyptian postal stamp), no archive of his personal and scholarly effects exists. One is now in the works thanks to the efforts of Abushady’s granddaughter, the Brooklyn-based artist and writer Joy Garnett. The proposed archive, for which Garnett is raising funds via the online platform Hatchfund, would preserve and translate the vast collection of artifacts from his life she inherited in 2008.
Born in Egypt and educated in London, Abushady had a career that spanned stints in Alexandria, Egypt, New York City, and Washington, D.C., where he passed away in 1955. Though he studied to become a physician, Abushady was, over the course of his life, a prolific inventor and founder of institutes, societies, and publications. Among his achievements in publishing alone, the literary journal Apollo (1932–34) is today regarded as a landmark of 20th-century Arab Romanticism, while Bee World, the bilingual periodical launched by the Apis Club (a scholarly beekeeping society he started) continues to be published by the International Bee Research Association. (Abushady also founded The Bee Kingdom, a “monthly review of modern bee culture” and the source of the name Garnett has given this archive project.)
“These family stories are retold, and you don’t know what to ask,” Garnett told Hyperallergic on a recent afternoon Brooklyn, speaking of the importance of creating a scholarly archive to preserve her maternal grandfather’s legacy for future generations. Abushady is a beloved figure in Egypt, a sui generis character who, in addition to his major contributions to beekeeping — he invented the removable aluminum honeycomb, among other patents, also “saw bees as a perfect metaphor for language,” Garnett said.
Encompassing the books, prints, cartoons, photographs, and correspondence Abushady amassed during his life on three continents, the project is a significant undertaking in archiving and translation. Garnett hopes to partner with an institution to host the result in “an online, open-access” platform, citing the Cornell-based Waguih Ghali archive as a model. The fundraising campaign, set to conclude on December 31, will cover the purchase of materials for archiving and the translations of documents from Arabic to English. Two lithographs, replicating an original Abushady patent and a political cartoon depicting the man himself, will also be produced by Garnett as incentives to donors.
A cartoon of Abushady selected for reproduction by Joy Garnett
This essay was first published in Ibraaz Platform 006: What role can the archive play in developing and sustaining a critical and culturally located art history?
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When family members die they take their memories, facts and figures with them. Their stories, as well as their lies and omissions, become harder to track after they've gone. They leave behind mountains of material, with few entry points. If you dare to enter, you will find yourself alone in the archive.
Someone close to you dies. A generation apart, you are busy with your own life. You may choose to ignore all the stuff they leave behind. If you hired someone to cart it away, no one would blame you. But perhaps you value these leavings for personal reasons, or even 'historical' ones. So instead, you make the choice to plunge in. At first this is cathartic. You start blindly, picking away at the monolith, peeling back a transparent corner until you see something. You think you know the general shape and size of it, you think you can get away with a few weeks' work and be done with it. You figure you've seen all the pretty hairpins, grease crayons, love notes on creased napkins, all the dusty books. But then again, if you are like me, the whole situation will gnaw at you.
This happened: tired and covered in dirt and sweat after a day of digging through my mother's storage, I found a strange box, which contained many envelopes and another, smaller box. I felt a jagged sensation in my gut that I mistook for a symptom of mourning. Wiping the sweat from my face, I knelt before the box to read the label: an adhesive tag with my mother's hand in red Sharpie: 'Papers to Sort'. The archive, it seems, had finally gotten away from her. Inside, a smaller box was labelled 'More Egypt'. Inside this box was the first crop of what was to become a legion of things that had been secreted away. My first find, large-format negatives that had been resting for seventy-five years, were perfectly preserved in little glassine envelopes. Yet more images, I thought; more than I was prepared for. But also amulets, perfume bottles, pins, ID cards, feathers, kites, love letters, poems, diaries, birth certificates, death notices. Items that document events I never knew about, showing the people I thought I knew all about, in attitudes and places that demonstrate the absolute inadequacy of my imaginative faculties. There was more to the story than the neat one that was drawn for me. My family, with its famous poet patriarch, had kept secrets.
This scenario was to be repeated at least three dozen times over the next two years, in apartments and storage units, at institutions in faraway towns and cities, and, eventually, in other countries. Following the trail, I would buy plane and train tickets I couldn't afford, and stay with friends or at B&B's in close proximity to certain libraries. By then I would have learned which special collections housed the things that I had to see and hold. I laughed when, at one state-of-the-art vault, a surly staffer handed me a pair of white cotton gloves and took away my laptop so I could safely examine my aunt's letters regarding her donation of my grandfather's papers. They were, of course, the same grumbly letters written in the same minute hand as the ones she sent me regularly since I was a child. But here, in the context of my grandfather's personal papers and so many other things that had almost escaped me, her grumbling meant something different. Docile, I donned the white gloves.
Once humbled by the archive, my commitment to it became steely. My early tentative pokes into its hidden folds were marked by a combination of trepidation and overexcitement. I felt at once stupid and grateful, like a gangly puppy who gets to gnaw on an oversized bone. There were reasons for my sense of inadequacy, such as my half-baked Arabic. Plus, I still had no idea of the extent of the archive. I thought I was dealing with something finite, the contained leftovers of a generation, rudely abridged by decades of packing and unpacking, voyages by ship and train, seizures by customs at home and abroad – all the brutal inconveniences of repatriation, dispersal, accident and loss. I had yet to learn of the existence of so many remaining books, objects, photographs, keepsakes and letters. And I had yet to consider the archive's ingeniousness, its unlikely survival through conventions of redundancy (duplicate prints!), the many rhizomatic outposts in rare book cages, filing cabinets, safe deposit boxes and basements scattered across the globe. And now it has me with my camera, my scanner and the Internet. Daily, I dig through the archive, holding the things I never knew in my hands, seeing them for myself.
In exploring the theme of the archive, Ibraaz has invited writers, thinkers, artists, and other cultural practitioners to consider the contingent role of the archive today and its often ambiguous status in both art practices and cultural institutions across North Africa and the Middle East. Read the full platform question here.
Contributors to Platform 006 include, amongst others:
Mohamed Abdelkarim / Nevin Aladağ / Ian Almond /Héla Ammar / Daniel Berndt / Sheyma Buali / Ali Cherri / Hassan Darsi / Mai Elwakil / Mounir Fatmi / Azin Feizabadi / Adelina von Fürstenberg / Joy Garnett / Mariam Ghani / Francis Gooding / Rana Hamadeh / Aleya Hamza / Adelita Husni-Bey / Maryam Jafri / Fawz Kabra / Katia Kameli / Maha Maamoun / Jumana Manna / Laura U. Marks / Mona Marzouk / Shaheen Merali / Walter D. Mignolo / Mariam Motamedi-Fraser / Ahmed Nagy / Joe Namy / Tsolin Nalbantian / Elif Öner/ Walid Raad / Lucien Samaha / Nada Shabout / Setareh Shahbazi / Rona Sela / Sandra Skurvida / Noor Kadhim / Tara Agdashaloo /