WATANI International
13 June 2010
It must go to the credit of screenplay and drama writer Usama Anwar Okasha that he single-handedly transformed Egyptian TV drama from light sitcom entertainment to a genre of thought-provoking literature in which he exploited the characters, dialogue, and plot, to weave a rich tapestry of tight-knitted drama. The characters he drew came straight from the Egyptian scene, from the back streets and alleyways as well as the tree-lined boulevards, the cottages as well as the palatial residences.
Arabesque
Egyptian viewers will never forget Hassan Arabesque in Okasha’s TV serial drama Arabesque. Hassan Arabesque was the ‘defeated’ artist carpenter whose traditional, meticulous wooden latticework was difficult to sell in a market dominated by machine-made goods. His wife leaves him for a rich Saudi man—a not-so-subtle allusion to the defeat of Egyptian values before imported Wahhabi thought. As in most of Okasha’s works, the characters came from the wide spectrum of Egyptian community, including Muslims, Copts, and Nubians. He later said he wished to highlight that the Egyptian society was formed of various elements that have been over the ages intricately—and delicately—interlinked, just as in the famed arabesque woodwork. Arabesque itself, he said, was famous for use in Islamic architecture, but actually derived from Coptic as can be seen in the old churches of Egypt.
Okasha tackled overpopulation and the failure of the concept of family planning in his profound work The Nile still flows. He presented what amounted to a live reading in the modern history of Egypt in his epic TV drama Layalil-Hilmiya (Hilmiya Evenings), a work which spanned the intertwined lives of three generations of Egyptian families from various social classes. In as much as it depicted the struggles, ambitions, love and hate, poignancy and serenity, loyalty and revenge, the sins and virtues of the fathers visited upon the children, spanning the years since Egypt was a laid back agricultural community to the brisk, materialist 1990s, Hilmiya Evenings is truly the jewel of the crown of Okasha’s works.
Unforgettable
Okasha loved to depict the ‘virtuous character’ in a chaotic world. In Journey of Mr Abul-Ela al-Bishry, Abul-Ela is the man who staunchly adheres to the age-old values of love, loyalty, and friendship, only to discover that he is alone in his faith; others have replaced these values with ‘modern’, fickle ones. Miss Hekmat’s conscience depicts the warm-hearted, hardworking headmistress who, after years of running her school according to the most elevated educational and moral principles, finds she has to fight the modern-day vulgarity of rich, powerful, well-connected and ignorant parents. She loses. The theme of money-backed vulgarity viciously fighting the finesse of the good old days occurs again in The white flag. A coarse, illiterate trader with deep pockets vows to buy a beautiful villa in a lovely spot on Alexandria’s beachfront off a refined aristocrat, in order to demolish it and erect a huge apartment building instead. When the aristocrat refuses, a vicious struggle ensues in which the trader uses her worst tricks. The drama ends, however, in an unforgettable scene in which the young men and women of the neighbourhood stand in front of the bulldozer that would have demolished the villa, and halt its progress.
Okasha was without rival in the manner in which he managed to weave the Coptic character into everyday life texture. In this he was utterly realistic, depicting his Copts as neither overly ideal nor particularly evil; any of them could have been your next-door neighbour in real life.
Inconsolable
Usama Anwar Okasha passed away on 28 May. He leaves behind a huge number of real-life Egyptian characters etched in the memory of TV and cinema viewers in Egypt. Especially in view of the decline of drama writing in Egypt and the mediocre works we now more often than not have to put up with, the loss of Okasha is inconsolable.
May God rest his soul in peace.