As a child in the late 1950s, the leading Egyptian theatre director Hassan el-Gueretly remembers accompanying his mother to the workshop of Pierre Clouvas, a couturier in central Cairo. Various Miss Egypts bought their dresses there, as did Sabah, the Lebanese singer and actress. For the young Gueretly, it gave a rare frisson to see the superstar’s avant-garde clothes up close.
“I remember walking around the atelier and seeing Sabah’s robes hanging on mannequins in the next room to my mother,” Gueretly recalls. “As a lover of performance and film, I was thrilled to move among her clothes.”
Sabah died last week, aged 87, and her death prompted in Egypt as much as in Lebanon an outpouring of warm memories. At a bleak moment for the region, Sabah’s joyous career and character are reminders of a lighter side to life.
“When you think of the gloom we’re in in the Arab world, to hear her voice is to make life liveable,” said Gueretly. “It doesn’t make me nostalgic – I don’t think in terms of past and present, I think of the future – but to hear this dead woman sing, it makes you think she has a lot more life than many people who are living.”
Born Jeanette Feghali in a mountain village in Lebanon, Sabah took her nickname from the Arabic word for morning, an appropriate nom-de-plume for a woman adored for her sunny vitality. She moved to Egypt in the 40s and became a star of musical cinema, appearing in more than 80 films, performing about 3,000 songs, and developing a reputation for bold fashion choices.
Few remember Clouvas now, and while central Cairo still has its charms, it is no longer grand, and the shops are no longer fancy. Sabah is a throwback to what, according to one nostalgic narrative, was a more triumphant era. An era not of fundamentalism but of pan-Arabism. Of a Cairo, where Sabah spent her cinematic heyday in the 40s and 50s, that housed a flourishing film industry – a Hollywood-on-the-Nile or “Niley-wood”, as Gueretly jokes. And of a pre-civil war Lebanon whose celebrities one by one are dying.
“With her passing away, an entire beautiful past of Lebanon passes away,” Walid Jumblatt, the Lebanese politician, wrote last week. “She was a great singer of a Lebanon that my generation knew that will never come back.”
If in artistic terms Sabah was of another time, in social terms she was in some ways ahead of it. Other divas of her era married and divorced several times. Sabah’s nine or 10 marriages – no one is certain which – outnumbered everyone else’s. She broke taboos with her frank and frequent pronouncements about men and desire. And as she got older she ignored pressure to hide herself away, continuing to wear outlandish outfits and date younger men.
“In a male-dominant society, she was a symbol of woman power,” said Helen Shammas, a Syrian-Lebanese artist and writer who is related to one of Sabah’s husbands. “She was a free woman with nothing to hide. Joy, terror and disappointment all showed behind her heavy makeup. What amazes me most is that she was never ashamed of her old age – she dressed in outfits that betrayed her decaying body. I loved her acceptance of life.”
With fellow divas Fairouz and Umm Kulthum, Sabah became one of the undisputed giants of the age, building a successful stage career in Beirut after leaving Cairo for good in the 60s.
Unlike Fairouz, Sabah’s work was not political, apart from a couple of songs that dealt with pan-Arabism. And unlike Umm Kulthum, her songs were not weighty or serious. Nor was she a strong actress.
Instead her vocal technique, her warmth and sincerity as a performer, and the lighter nature of her songs [Yana Yana] were what made her loved. “She had no relationship with political issues – and that’s why people needed her,” said Momen al-Mohammadi, an Egyptian author and thinker.
Salwa, a Bahraini lawyer, recalls watching Sabah perform at a private wedding in the 80s, at the height of the Lebanese civil war. Her warmth has left a lasting memory. “Usually the famous singers would leave weddings quickly, but Sabah really looked like she was happy to be there,” remembers Salwa. “She would go up to people and interact with them. She sang old songs, new songs, whatever anyone asked her to. She was smiling the whole time.”
And she took people’s minds off the conflict in her homeland, says Salwa. “She was singing and dancing and jumping around when Lebanon was in a war – and she showed a different side to the country. Back then people didn’t go on holiday to Lebanon, and she was one of the few happy Lebanese people we saw.”
In Lebanon itself, 30 years on, Sabah’s death is about more than just the departure of an entertainer. For Fadi al-Abdallah, a Lebanese poet and critic, it has also raised gnawing questions about the nature of Lebanese identity.
“There is a general feeling that the symbols of the era are leaving, and that at the same time they haven’t been replaced by a new generation,” says Abdallah, who wrote a widely shared paean to Sabah last week.
“There is the feeling that the old times were better, and also objectively that the new era of art is less interesting, and less capable of leaving a mark in our heads and hearts. And that the ingredients of our identities are being more and more lost.”
Additional reporting by Raya Jalabi and Manu Abdo
