Wednesday, March 13, 2024

A01592 - Ali Zaky, An Egyptian Gymnast

 Ali Zaky (b. 1930 – d. March 12, 2005) was an Egyptian gymnast who competed at the 1948 Summer Olympics and the 1952 Summer Olympics. 

A01591 - Wilhelmina Wiggins Fernandez, The Diva of Divas

 

Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez, the Diva of ‘Diva,’ Dies at 75

A soprano who rose from South Philadelphia to the opera houses of Europe, she was memorably seen and heard in a 1981 film considered a paragon of cinematic style.

Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez, wearing a floor-length light-colored gown with one shoulder bare, stands on a stage with her arms outstretched and her palms facing upward.
The soprano Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez in the 1981 movie “Diva.” An art-house hit that became a cult favorite, it would be her only film.Credit...Rialto Pictures

Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez, a South Philadelphia-bred soprano who sang in the opera houses of Europe and gained even more fame for playing the title role in the style-soaked 1981 French thriller “Diva,” died on Feb. 2 at her home in Lexington, Ky. She was 75.

Her daughter and only immediate survivor, Sheena M. Fernandez, said the cause was cancer.

Trained at the Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia and later at the Juilliard School in New York City, Ms. Fernandez made her mark in the 1970s as Bess in the Houston Grand Opera’s international traveling production of George Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess.” The tour took her to Europe, where she caught the eye of Rolf Liebermann, the impresario known for reviving the Paris Opera. He offered her a two-year contract.

It was in a 1980 performance as Musetta in “La Bohème” alongside Plácido Domingo and Kiri Te Kanawa that she caught the attention of the French director Jean-Jacques Beineix, who was looking for a figure radiant enough to serve as the diva at the heart of his forthcoming film.

“Diva” was considered a high-water mark in the movement known as the cinéma du look, a high-sheen school of French film often centered on stylish, disaffected youth in the France of the 1980s and ’90s. A film with all the saturated color and gloss of a 1980s music video, it was an art-house hit that became a cult favorite for the initiated.

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The story revolves around a young opera fan named Jules (played by Frédéric Andréi) who grows so infatuated with an American opera star named Cynthia Hawkins that he surreptitiously tapes one of her performances — despite her well-known decree that none of her work be recorded, since it would capture only a part of the power and immediacy of her grandeur.

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Ms. Fernandez and a young man in a red jacket sit next to each other in an outdoor setting. She wears a brightly striped outfit and holds an umbrella. He looks at her intensely; she looks at him with what might be either contempt or annoyance.
Ms. Fernandez in “Diva” with Frédéric Andréi, who played an infatuated fan.Credit...Rialto Pictures

That grandeur is on full display in Ms. Fernandez’s opening scene, as she takes the stage in a hauntingly weathered old theater wearing a shimmering white gown and metallic eye shadow. She proceeds to mesmerize the house — and Jules — with a soaring rendition of the aria “Ebben? Ne andrò lontana” (“Well, then? I’ll go far away”) from Alfredo Catalani’s opera “La Wally.”

Jules’s tape of the performance becomes a device that leads him into a swirl of underworld hit men, Taiwanese music pirates and whirring engines in a moped-focused chase scene that reaches into the Paris Metro.

Not all the critics were charmed. Vincent Canby of The New York Times called the film “an anthology of affectations.” But Pauline Kael of The New Yorker praised it as a “glittering toy of a movie” that “dashes along with pell-mell gracefulness.” While extolling Ms. Fernandez as “awesomely beautiful,” Ms. Kael even made the allowance that her “American-accented French and her amateurishness as an actress are ingratiating.”

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“Diva,” in fact, would be Ms. Fernandez’s only film role. In interviews, she said that she had never any desire to be an actress, believing that the static environment of a film set was no substitute for the electricity of the stage.

Still, in a 1987 interview with the radio host Bruce Duffie, she expressed satisfaction that her role had brought exposure to opera “to a completely different audience who are probably not accustomed to going to the opera or hearing classical music.”

“More and more, I find in doing recitals and concerts that the audience is younger and younger, and it’s because they have seen the film,” she added. “Not only are they coming to see me, but they say they’re going to see some other people, and that’s great.”

Wilhelmenia Wiggins was born on Jan. 5, 1949, in Philadelphia, the elder of two children of Ernest and Vinelee (Clayton) Wiggins.

Her vocal talents were on display as early as age 5, when she sang with the choir of her family’s Baptist church. By her teens, her celestial soprano was taking flight in the choir at the William Penn High School for Girls. She honed her voice with formal training under the soprano Tillie Barmach at the Settlement Music School in Philadelphia.

After graduating from the Academy of Vocal Arts, also in Philadelphia, in 1969, she earned a scholarship to Juilliard in New York. She married Ormond Fernandez, a mail carrier, in 1971 and ultimately left Juilliard in 1973 without a degree to raise her infant daughter.

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Ms. Fernandez later recalled the challenges she faced as a Black performer trying to carve out a career in the Eurocentric world of opera.

“For a long time I was afraid I couldn’t sing because I was worried how color was affecting my chances,” The Washington Post quoted her as saying in a 1982 profile. “I wished I could sing behind a screen and just be judged on my voice.”

In auditions, she said, she often noticed “the little falling of the face” when she arrived, which she interpreted to mean “We would like you to do the role, but you’re Black.” Then, she added, “they’d talk amongst themselves while you sang.”

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A black-and-white photo of Ms. Fernandez and a bearded male singer onstage. She is lying down; he stands behind her with both arms around her; they both appear to be singing.
Donnie Ray Albert and Ms. Fernandez in the title roles of the Houston Grand Opera’s production of “Porgy and Bess” in 1978.Credit...Keystone/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images

While “Diva” was Ms. Fernandez’s last appearance on celluloid, it was merely a prelude to a long career that included her New York City Opera debut in 1982, once again as Musetta in “La Bohème,” as well as performances throughout Europe.

In addition to making Musetta her own, she also made the title role in Verdi’s “Aida,” an Ethiopian princess held captive in ancient Egypt, a signature. At one point she even performed the role amid the temples of Luxor in Egypt itself.

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In 1992, Ms. Fernandez won a Laurence Olivier Award, the British equivalent of a Tony, for best actress in a musical for her rendition of Carmen in “Carmen Jones.”

She married Andrew W. Smith, a baritone with the Metropolitan Opera in New York, in 2001 and moved to Lexington, where he was directing the voice program at Kentucky State University. He died in 2018. Her first marriage ended in divorce in the early 1980s.

Motivated to complete her education, Ms. Fernandez earned a bachelor’s degree in voice from the University of Kentucky in 2007 and later a master’s degree in education from Georgetown College in Georgetown, Ky. The master’s program prepared her for her eventual work as a special-education teacher in a Lexington elementary school.

Although she carved out a lasting place in cinema lore with her role as a big-screen diva, Ms. Fernandez never tried to inhabit such a persona away from the stage, even when her movie fame was fresh.

She told The Washington Post in 1982 that the film “Diva” “opened up a different kind of world for me.”

“I’m being recognized on the street,” she said, “and I just finished a recording session. It seems I’m getting a little more attention.”

Even so, on that hot summer day when she was being interviewed in her South Philadelphia home, with children outside splashing in water gushing from open fire hydrants, she said: “This is my identity. I don’t want to pretend to be what I’m not.”

A01590 - Fatima Bernawi, The First Female Palestinian Resistance Organizer

Fatima Mohammed Bernawi (also transliterated Barnawi, b. 1939, Jerusalem, Mandatory Palestine – d. November 3, 2022, Cairo, Egypt) was a Palestinian freedom fighter who was involved in the Palestinian Freedom Movement of the mid-1960s, a significant period of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She was known as the first Palestinian woman to have organized a resistance attack in Israel—the attempted bombing of a movie theatre in October 1967.

Bernawi was born in Jerusalem in 1939.  At the age of nine, during the 1948 Nakba, her mother who is Palestinian was displaced from Jerusalem to a refugee camp near Amman, Jordan. However, they later returned to Palestine to her Nigerian father, who had fought in the 1936 Palestine revolt, and who had remained behind.

Bernawi worked as a practical nurse for the Arab-American Oil Company in Saudi Arabia (ARAMCO) but was not allowed to give shots to patients because of the color of her skin, despite her Palestinian nationality. 

Of thirty-four Palestinian women whom Amal Kawar interviewed for her study Daughters of Palestine, Bernawi was one of only four who joined the resistance movement initially as a freedom fighter before becoming a political resistor. The others were Laila Khaled, Aisha Odeh, and Rasmiyeh Odeh.  

The attempted bombing incident occurred in October 1967 at the Zion Cinema in West Jerusalem. Bernawi said the bomb's civilian target was chosen in protest of a film that celebrated the Six Day War. The bomb failed to explode and Bernawi was arrested by Israeli soldiers for the attempt. Bernawi claimed her skin color was a factor in her arrest.

Though sentenced to life in prison, Bernawi was released in a prisoner exchange in 1977 after having served 10 years. She was deported, but returned to the political party Fatah, later serving as the first female chief of the Palestinian Female Police Corps in Gaza. Later on, she married a former prisoner from Acre, Fawzi al-Nimr, who was released in May 1985.

By 1996, Bernawi was the highest-ranking female in the Fatah militia and served as the head of the women's section of the police in the Palestinian self-rule government in the Gaza Strip and Jericho. Yasser Arafat, the noted leader of Fatah and Chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), held her in high regard, once saying that "if he would marry anyone it would be [Fatima] Bernawi".

On May 28, 2015, Bernawi was honored by Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas with the Military Star of Honor "out of appreciation for her pioneering role in the struggle" and "for the public good." Though the bombing she was honored for was a failure, Bernawi insisted it was successful, saying, "This is not a failure, because it generated fear throughout the world. Every woman who carries a bag needs to be checked before she enters the supermarket, any place, cinemas and pharmacies." Bernawi was also honored alongside Mahmoud Bakr Hijazi and Ahmad Moussa Salama in honor of Palestinian Prisoner's Day, April 17, 2015. She was described as "one of the first Palestinian women to adopt [the means of] armed self-sacrifice operations after the start of the modern Palestinian revolution, which was launched by Fatah on 1 January 1965. She was the first young Palestinian woman to be arrested by the Israeli security forces, and is the first woman prisoner listed in the records of the [Palestinian] women prisoners' movement..."

On November 3, 2022, Bernawi died at "Palestine hospital" in Cairo, Egypt. She was later buried in Gaza City on November 6, 2022. 

A01589 - Marnia Lazreg, Scholar of Algeria and the Veil

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Marnia Lazreg (b. January 10, 1941, Mostaganem, French Algeria - d. January 13, 2024, Manhattan, New York City, New York) was an Algerian academic. She was a specialist in the Muslim world, particularly on Muslim women. Her best-known work is Questioning the Veil: Open Letters to Muslim Women.

Questioning the Veil: Open Letters to Muslim Women is a 2009 book by Marnia Lazreg, published by Princeton University Press. In the book Lazreg asks critical questions regarding commonly accepted reasons why women wear Islamic hijab or the veil (khimar),[1] and in each chapter she asks this question to readers in the form of letters.[2] Daniel Varisco of Hofstra University described the book as "a polemic, in this case against the veil, from a secular standpoint."[3] The book is addressed to women who observe or are considering observing hijab by wearing the khimar.[4]

Ethnicity and Race in a Changing World: A Review Journal stated that "By drawing attention to the veil – a subject which the author claims has been dismissed as ‘unimportant’ given the wider political climate, Questioning the Veil instead shows how discussions of the veil illuminate our understanding of the contemporary role of Islamic society and its relationship with the ‘West’."[5]

Lazreg, a professor of sociology at Hunter College and at the City University of New York Graduate Center,[4][6] is a Muslim woman who was born in Algeria. She wore the hijab as a girl because her paternal grandmother had asked her to.[1]

The book begins with an introduction in which Lazreg had outlined her previously published statements, in which she criticized the ideas that women needed to be rescued from the veil or Muslim men, and she criticized the concept that Islam oppresses women. After the introduction, there are five chapters.[2] Chapter 1 discusses wearing the hijab to show modesty. Chapter 2 discusses whether the hijab prevents men from making advanced towards women. Chapter 3 discusses using the hijab as a marker of a Muslim identity. Chapter 4 analyzes the issue in regard to religious conviction and piety. In Chapter 5 the author states her belief that women should not wear the hijab.[4]

The book has a strong focus on Algeria and her own experiences growing up, but it does not broadly cover the whole Muslim world and all social classes.[7] The book includes content from interviews of Muslim women in the Middle East and North Africa as well as France and the United States; these women also discuss their experiences.[4]

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Marnia Lazreg, Scholar of Algeria and the Veil, Dies at 83

A Hunter College sociologist, she examined the power dynamics and difficult history of her native land from a feminist and anticolonial perspective.

Marnia Lazreg, a woman with brown-hair and wire-framed glasses wearing a gray sweater, a black top and a colorful scarf, stands, apparently on a rooftop, with a view of New York city buildings behind her.
Marnia Lazreg in an undated photo. Her books explored, among other things, Algerian class structure, the use of torture by imperial powers and the resurgence of the veil in Muslim societies. Credit...via Hunter College

As a young girl growing up in colonial Algeria, Marnia Lazreg was enjoined by her grandmother to wear a veil, to “protect” herself. Ms. Lazreg refused. She didn’t feel the need for such protection, and the veil wouldn’t provide it anyway.

Decades later, as a Hunter College sociologist, she looked more deeply into an aspect of Muslim society that had haunted her since that childhood moment: Was the veil imposed on women really necessary, from either a religious or a security perspective?

The answer she came up with in a collection of five essays, “Questioning the Veil: Open Letters to Muslim Women,” published in 2009, was the same she had given her grandmother so many years before: a firm negative.

Ms. Lazreg died on Jan. 13 in Manhattan. She was 83.

Her death, in a hospital where she was being treated for cancer, was confirmed by her son Ramsi Woodcock.

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Ms. Lazreg’s academic work revolved around the difficult history of her native land, which has struggled to free itself from the legacy of colonialism, the heritage of its bloody war of liberation against France, and the six decades of authoritarian rule still stifling it — rule that she, as a dedicated anticolonialist, was careful not to criticize overtly.

In books that also explored Algerian class structure (“The Emergence of Classes in Algeria,” 1976) and the use of torture by imperial powers (“Torture and the Twilight of Empire,” 2008), among other subjects, Ms. Lazreg grappled with both the complicated heritage of domination by France and the internal conflicts arising in Muslim societies.

Though not widely reviewed and often laced with academic jargon, Ms. Lazreg’s books were unusual because she herself was unusual: an Algerian-born scholar, from a working-class background, based in America and writing in English, from a feminist, anticolonial perspective.

Like other Algerian intellectuals, she was haunted by the continuing hold over her country of the colonial power, France, against which Algeria’s nationhood had shaped itself.

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In contemporary Algeria, France remains an obsession. Ms. Lazreg was not immune.

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A close-up portrait of Ms. Lazreg, wearing dark-framed glasses an clasping her hands.
Writing in the Journal of World Philosophies in 2020, Ms. Lazreg said, “Writing about Algeria is an endless discovery of a history I was never taught.” Credit...via Hunter College

“The only thing this Algerian wants is that we be left alone, that we be left to be, without having to remind you, French intellectuals and politicians, that we don’t belong to you, that we never belonged to you. So busy yourself with your own problems. Algeria is no longer one of them,” she said in an interview with the Algerian news website Toute Sur l’Algerie in 2009.

Yet her work was shaped by this twisted relationship. “Writing about Algeria is an endless discovery of a history I was never taught,” she wrote in the Journal of World Philosophies in 2020.

“Thinking I would come to terms with the colonial legacy, I first studied the emergence of social classes in the aftermath of the war of decolonization in Algeria,” Ms. Lazreg continued. She concluded that classes under the country’s regime at the time, which styled itself socialist, would “emancipate themselves from their dependency on the state.”

That argument, though, turned out to be incorrect in a country where everything, from business to social and intellectual life, still depends on the state.

“She was very anticolonial, and I think that made her reluctant to take too hard a line against the Algerian government, for fear of feeding Western narratives,” Mr. Woodcock, her son, said in an interview. “She was always very proud of Algerian independence.”

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Perhaps her best-known work was “Questioning the Veil,” in which she pushed back against the idea that the Muslim faith requires it, or that it represents an authentic expression of choice for women.

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A book cover featuring a Picasso-like illustration of a woman with several faces, with the title “Questioning the Veil” in red upper-and-lowercase letters on a red background, the subtitle “Open Letters to Muslim Women” in small uppercase letters below it, and the author’s name below that.
Perhaps Ms. Lazreg’s best-known work was “Questioning the Veil” (2009), in which she pushed back against the idea that the Muslim faith requires the veil, or that it represents an authentic expression of choice for women.Credit...Princeton University Press

“Denial of a woman’s physical body helps to sustain the fiction that veiling it, covering it up, causes no harm to the woman who inhabits the body,” Ms. Lazreg wrote.

She suggested that social pressure from men was behind much of the push to re-veil. She recounted the poignant anecdote of a young woman whose systematic beating by her brother stopped only when she put on the veil.

Nonetheless, and in spite of these findings, “she always wanted to avoid playing into Western narratives that Islam is misogynistic,” Mr. Woodcock said. “On the one hand she was anticolonialist, but she was also a feminist. It was a tightrope she always had to walk.”

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The Economist called the book “uneven and with a rather weak grasp of French secularism,” but nonetheless said it had “great merit.” Other judgments in the book have not worn so well, for instance her criticism of “the American-sponsored constitutions of both Afghanistan and Iraq,” which she said were “lauded as protecting the ‘rights’ of women in spite of evidence to the contrary.”

Ms. Lazreg’s abiding concern with colonialism spilled over into her 2008 book on torture, which in her vision became a kind of matrix for colonial society: “The history of torture becomes synonymous with the history of colonialism and war, with modern history itself,” the historian Priya Satia wrote in a review in the The Times Literary Supplement in 2009. “In Lazreg’s ethical vision, colonialism itself is a kind of torture chamber.”

Among Ms. Lazreg’s other books was a novel, “The Awakening of the Mother” (2019); “The Eloquence of Silence: Algerian Women in Question” (1994); “Foucault’s Orient” (2017), a critique of the historian and philosopher Michel Foucault; and “Islamic Feminism and the Discourse of Post-Liberation” (2021).

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Another book cover with another Picassoesque illustration, depicting a series of multicolored bodies, some of them headless. The title and subtitle, “The Eloquence of Silence: Algerian Women in Question,” are written in straightforward type, upper and lowercase, at the top. The author’s name and the words “Second Edition,” in the same typeface, are at the bottom.
Ms. Lazreg’s other books included a 1994 study of women in Algeria.Credit...Taylor & Francis Ltd.

Marnia Lazreg was born on Jan. 10, 1941, in the Algerian coastal city of Mostaganem, east of the capital, Algiers, to Aoued Lazreg, who had a dry goods shop in the city’s market, and Fatima (Ghrib) Lazreg.

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Through chance and good luck, Ms. Lazreg was able to attend a French school and obtain a baccalauréat degree — the equivalent of a high school diploma — even as Algeria was fighting for its independence, in 1960. It was a rare achievement for an Algerian woman at that time.

She received a degree in English literature from the University of Algiers in 1966, and, because of her proficiency in English — “she had studied English obsessively as a way of resistance” against the French, her son said — she became a valued recruit for the state oil firm, Sonatrach, which has recently been mired in corruption scandals.

In 1966 she opened Sonatrach’s first office in the U.S., in Rockefeller Center in Manhattan. She began attending classes at New York University and earned a Ph.D. in sociology there in 1974.

Alongside her academic career, Ms. Lazreg worked in international development for the World Bank and the United Nations, with a focus on women’s issues. She helped coordinate World Bank efforts to bring women into lending programs in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and she was a consultant to the U.N. on development programs.

After an earlier teaching stint at Hunter College and spells at Sarah Lawrence and Hampshire, she returned to Hunter full time in 1988. She also taught at the City University of New York Graduate Center.

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In addition to her son Ramsi Woodcock, Ms. Lazreg is survived by another son, Reda Woodcock, and a granddaughter. An earlier marriage ended in divorce.

After she received her baccalauréat, her son said, Ms. Lazreg had taught for a time in what were called “native” schools — a limited opening toward the future. Algeria’s independence in 1962, he added, opened up a new world for her.

“That experience of liberation was transformative for her,” he said, adding that it led her to bat away complaints about the long decades of oppressive rule Algerians have suffered under since then. “She would say: ‘Look, we’re free. You can’t put a price on that.’”