Under an old tree, the heroine of the film Al Haram—which means taboo—dies while giving birth to a baby, conceived from being raped while she worked in the fields.
What might the late director Henry Barakat say today if he saw the trucks at the entrances of Meet Swid Village, Dikirnes Center or Dakahliya Governorate? How would he have reacted to the July 2011 revolution, a concept on which he dedicated his realistic film – based on a story by Yusuf Idris –to eliminate land slavery in the Egyptian countryside?
Under an old tree, the heroine of the film Al Haram—which means taboo—dies while giving birth to a baby, conceived from being raped while she worked in the fields.
What might the late director Henry Barakat say today if he saw the trucks at the entrances of Meet Swid Village, Dikirnes Center or Dakahliya Governorate? How would he have reacted to the July 2011 revolution, a concept on which he dedicated his realistic film – based on a story by Yusuf Idris –to eliminate land slavery in the Egyptian countryside?
The truth is that he would not see the beautiful face of his film’s heroine, Faten Hamama, who went to work instead of her ill husband. Instead, he would see the faces of dozens of sixty-something women, sitting in a truck, putting on the same clothes today that they might have worn in the 1960s. He would see a woman like Zainab Abdullah.
Abdullah travels from her village to toil away on large properties still under control of Mit Faress, Ezbet Karam, Alwanjeel and Mershah villages, where there are 800 acres of harvestable wheat.
Abdullah works in those fields for 10 hours in return for 20 Egyptian pounds, of which she, along with every other labourer, pays the truck driver one pound. The driver takes them to the fields at 6:00 am and drives them back home at 10:00 am; the second shift starts at 1:00pm and goes until 6:00 that evening. Abdullah pays the female contactor two pounds commission to be selected for work. At the end of the day she is left with 17 pounds or less than two Euros.
A Woman’s Work is Never Done
According to studies by the Egyptian-based Non Government Organisation, Land Center for Human Rights, there are about three million rural manual workers—half a million in Dakahliya Governorate alone—and most of them are women. The Labour Law of 2003 does not apply to agricultural or to domestic workers; leaving millions to work under difficult and inhumane conditions with neither insurance nor legal protection.
The women in these fields work because they are divorced or widows, or their husbands are incarcerated, according to Mahmud Mensi of the Land Center.
Working for about 104 days a year, they are subject to the worst kind of exploitation with little attention from trade unions. By their early thirties, many start to suffer from slipped discs, as well as chest diseases – mainly tuberculosis – during rice gathering season in particular, while spraying pesticides. The women treat their various skin and respiratory diseases with popular medical prescriptions because they don’t have the luxury of having a medical examination at health centres. Due to their poverty, they often exchange their wages for some of the crop they harvest, returning to an old primitive bartering system.
The work of female manual workers is not limited to agriculture in the Delta rural areas. Some of them, according to labour activist Khalid Abdulrahman, work in construction in the villages. Agricultural economies are generally poor and men disfavour working in this low-paid sector, although national unemployment rates exceed 20%.
A Lifetime in the Fields
“I spent my whole life among wheat, rice and fruit fields and farms,” says 75 year-old Hajja Aziza. “I started working when I was a child and continued even after getting married and having children and grandchildren.”
“My husband has died and with my son Abdulrahman, I have to take care of his family and the rest of my family, children and grandchildren. Between farming seasons, I sell dried onions on a rug in the village marketplace,” she says. She works both shifts using a scythe – a manual way that uses the cheap and skilful hands of the women who collect a complete acre yield in one day; the total wages of the 25 women is less than the rent of a specialized machine that could do the same work.
The dominant attribute of the female workers is that they are elderly—no younger than 45— and unhappiness factors multiply their ages. During a short break, they unfold their cloth bundles, which contain some bread and vegetables.
“I’ve been divorced for years,” says 55 year-old Umm Hashem, “but I used to work even when I was married. After ten hours of hard work, my husband would take my daily wages to buy bango—a type of marijuana. With divorce, I could guarantee that my wages would go to my four children,” she says, adding that she is also a domestic worker.
Fifty year-old Sayida Muhammad interrupts Umm Hashem to talk about other jobs that employ female manual workers, such as spraying pesticides; for which landowners don’t supply the women with respirators. If one woman is poisoned, a landowner expels her from his land to disclaim all responsibility. They all accept these dangerous jobs Muhammad says, because “hunger is faithless.”
The sun sets over the lawyer’s land while Hajja Zainab, Umm Hashem, Sayida and the other women wait beside the field for the truck. They sing well-known songs of manual workers, not knowing that Henry Barakat, some forty years ago, filmed their story. They simply believe that their experiences in 2012 are their fate and nothing else.
