New book details rich life of Inji Efflatoun beyond her time in prison

On the night of June 19, 1959, Inji Efflatoun stood alone on a Cairo street, attempting to hail a taxi. As a car finally pulled over, a group of men rushed her, seizing and forcing her into the vehicle. It was a sting. After months of living in hiding, disguising herself as a fellaha and flitting from house to house, the Egyptian painter and political activist had finally been arrested.

Efflatoun’s arrest marked a pivotal point. It signalled not only the beginning of her four-year imprisonment but a powerful new chapter in her artistic and political legacy. At Al Qanater Women’s Prison, Efflatoun produced some of her most renowned works – paintings that captured the resilience of the incarcerated women and the brutal intimacy of confinement. She also recorded her famous memoirs onto cassettes, which were later transcribed and shaped her posthumous image.

Though she recalled, in evocative detail, several phases of her life, it is her time behind bars that remains most closely associated with her name. But, as a new book reveals, Efflatoun’s legacy and life were too expansive to be confined to a prison cell.

The Life and Work of Inji Efflatoun is a project by the Barjeel Art Foundation, co-published with Skira. It is edited by Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi and Suheyla Takesh, who are the foundation’s founder and director, respectively.

The book presents, for the first time, an English translation of Efflatoun’s memoir. The memoir elucidates several of her key moments. They begin with her early life in the Shubra neighbourhood of Cairo and her time at the Sacred Heart School. They touch upon her early mentorship by Kamel el-Telmissany, from whom she learnt that painting meant “an honest expression of society and self”.

She speaks about her involvement in political groups advocating for women’s rights and anti-colonialism. She expresses her heartbreak after the death of her husband Hamdi Aboul Ela, a prosecutor who shared Efflatoun’s political ideals and who probably died from injuries sustained during his arrest and torture. She narrates details of her arrest and how she managed to smuggle paintings out of prison.

In short, the memoir describes a person who relentlessly defied confinement, whether the bubble of aristocracy, the constraints of gender norms or the physical walls of a prison. It portrays someone as fierce in her art as she was in her politics. For Efflatoun, painting and activism were not separate pursuits but shadows cast by the same flame.

The memoir is translated from Arabic by Ahmed Gobba and Avery Gonzales, both former students of Al Qassemi at Yale University. He credits them with initiating the project.

“The book started when Ahmed wrote his final paper on Inji after he discovered that her family was from the same province of his grandfather,” Al Qassemi says. “But her family were the landowners, and his family were the workers. And so there was this interesting relationship that was happening.”

Gobba then proposed translating Efflatoun’s memoir into English and began working with Gonzales. “Initially, we were only going to publish the diary,” Al Qassemi says. The memoir is substantial, taking up a third of the 320-page book, and it is easy to see why it became popular when it was first published in 1993, four years after her death.

“Inji’s life is fascinating,” Al Qassemi says. “She came from an elite background and ended up forsaking all that privilege, choosing to be an activist, to stand up for the rights of the less privileged. She related to people who she fought for. There is no surprise that her book became quite popular, and that she’s more known than other artists of her generation.”

“It started as a smaller project,” Takesh adds. “Then we thought to commission one or two new essays on Inji’s life and work to complement the memoir. One thing led to another, we kept discovering people’s research, and eventually we ended up with nine new essays.”

The essays explore the many facets of Efflatoun’s extraordinary life. They examine her fearless activism and how her art served as both a personal outlet and a political expression, often reflecting the intensity of her struggles and convictions. Several essays consider her prescient sensibilities, as well as her active engagement with international networks of solidarity. The essays also touch upon her ties with the Soviet Union and her affinity with Mexican artists, particularly David Alfaro Siqueiros. Her exhibitions are portrayed not just as artistic milestones, but as acts of diplomacy that extended her reach far beyond Egypt.

Efflatoun’s personal life also finds its way into these essays. They trace the transformative nature of her marriage to Aboul Ela, a union that deeply impacted her, even as it ended in tragedy. Equally moving is her determined effort to learn Arabic – having been educated in French – which is framed as emblematic of her drive to connect with the fabric of everyday Egyptian life.

“We are also republishing three existing texts,” Takesh says. “Two of them have been translated from Arabic. One of those is actually authored by Inji herself in 1972 as part of her participation in a conference in Tunis. The paper is about Egyptian modernist art, and she speaks about other people’s work such as Mahmoud Said and Mohamed Nagy. She also situated her own practice within that constellation.”

The book also features an essay by American artist Betty LaDuke, originally published in 1989.

Written after LaDuke visited Efflatoun in her Cairo studio in the late 1980s, the piece presents a broad stroke of the artist’s life before culminating with an interview that offers a rare, first-hand account of Efflatoun in her later years.

Beyond the essay, LaDuke played a key role in shaping the book’s visual narrative, contributing significantly to its rich collection of images. The Life and Work of Inji Efflatoun, in fact, draws from several private collections and institutional archives to present a vivid visual record of the artist’s life, featuring her paintings as well as rare archival photographs. It is, quite possibly, the most comprehensive publication of Efflatoun’s work to date, with high-resolution images that bring out the intricate details and textures of her paintings.

As a whole, the book seeks to do justice to a painter who has too often – and unfairly – been reduced to her years in prison.

“One thing we did is expand on the two-dimensionality of Inji,” Al Qassemi says. “Everything about Inji was about her arrest and time in jail. There were all these missing parts of her life.

“She spent four and a half years in jail, but she lived for many decades more than that. That’s why we called the book The Life and Work of Inji Efflatoun. We actually go into parts of her life that have been completely neglected before.”

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