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Umm Kulthum's Water Wheel
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 January 2016
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In a scene in Michal Goldman's documentary film Umm Kulthum: A Voice Like Egypt, two female friends of Umm Kulthum are reminiscing about her decision in the 1930s to purchase land for a villa in Cairo's Zamalek district. At the time, the women relate, Zamalek had very few buildings and was considered a remote location, far from the city center. “What were you thinking about to buy something so far away?” one of the women recalls her mother telling Umm Kulthum. At this point, the other woman, who had been distractedly knitting a scarf on her lap, suddenly brightens up and enters the conversation: “Do you remember the water wheel on the river in front of her house?” she excitedly asks her companion. “There was a waterwheel.” She imitates its high-pitched whirring sound as she turns her hand to trace the circular path of the wheel itself. “People used to say she kept it to remind her of the old days.”
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References
NOTES
1 Goldman, Michal, director, Umm Kulthum: A Voice Like Egypt (Cairo: Arab Film Distribution, 2006)Google Scholar.
2 Danielson, Virginia, The Voice of Egypt: Umm Kulthūm, Arabic Song, and Egyptian Society in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Ibid.; Lohman, Laura, Umm Kulthūm: Artistic Agency and the Shaping of an Arab Legend, 1967–2007 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.
4 Hirschkind, Charles, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Shannon, Jonathan Holt, Among the Jasmine Trees: Music and Modernity in Contemporary Syria (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2006);Google ScholarStokes, Martin, The Republic of Love: Cultural Intimacy in Turkish Popular Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 Smith, Mark M., Listening to Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2001)Google Scholar, 262.
6 Ibid., 264.
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8 Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape.
9 Feld, Steven, “A Rainforest Acoustemology,” in The Auditory Culture Reader, ed. Bull, Michael and Black, Les (New York: Berg, 2003), 226Google Scholar.