Out El Kouloub: Zanouba

The soundtrack: Wails from professional mourners and murmurs among the attendees. The novel opens with a funerary scene in Cairo at the turn of the twentieth century.

“God refuses to grace his home,” they whisper of an honored guest in the crowd. “Sad is a house deprived of a son,” they lament. “Not one son!” they say of this man who has four wives but “only” daughters. We enter yet another world where men are favored over women — even by the women. 

The titular character who becomes this man’s fifth wife is uneducated and easily swayed by superstition. Although the author treats her with compassion, Zanouba’s unhappy fate seems to me a gentle critique on the tolerance and perpetuation of this mindset among women.

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It is unimaginable for me to dethrone Naguib Mahfouz as the king and Nawal el Saadawi as the queen of Egyptian literature, but Out El Kouloub deserves a significant spot in the tapestry of Egyptian literature. I’m delighted with the discovery of this relatively obscure author who sheds light on Cairene women as Nawal el Saadawi does but without the rage, and paints early 20th century Cairo as perceptively as Naguib Mahfouz but through a more feminine frame of reference. 

Although Out El Kouloub grew up in Cairo, she fled to France during the Nasser regime. Once dubbed “the richest woman in Egypt” by many, Out El Kouloub’s life is as intriguing as her stories. The work is translated from the French by Nayra Atiya, as all of Out El Kouloub’s books were written in French.

On Women in Translation Month 2023, I write this for the rare reader who tries to look for traces of Out El Kouloub (1899–1968) in #bookstagram and finds only six frames bearing her hashtagged name. This will be the seventh. There should be more.