We need to talk about the taboos, and we need to cancel the word “taboos” from our lives — we need to talk about everything to become better. If we don’t, if we hide everything in denial, how are we going to become better?

— Marwan Hamed, director of the film adaptation of Cairene dentist Alaa al-Aswani’s best-selling novel, The Yacoubian Building, speaking about the recent commotion that his film caused. Alaa al-Aswani’s novel portrays a changing Cairo through the inhabitants of the Yacoubian Building (which really exists in downtown Cairo) and features a cross-section of Cairene society: a corrupt and wealthy politician, a sexually harassed woman, an intelligent but poor youth who is lured into mosques and militant Islam when he is rejected from the police force for being poor, as well as a gay and urbane newspaper editor.  The novel rocketed onto the charts as a bestseller in the Arabic-speaking world when it was first published in 2002, and it has subsequently retained its popularity.

One hundred and twelve MPs who have been frothily debating the film since it opened in Egypt over two weeks ago have registered their complaints about The Yacoubian Building. Mustafa Bakri, the MP spearheading the campaign against the film, stated that it is “spreading obscenity and debauchery.” The committee established by Parliament must now review the film, take the editorial machete to it, and produce a less “profane” version of the film, which would effectively amount to etching out the scenes explicitly featuring a gay relationship.  

Egypt is no stranger to either suppression or denial.  Accused with importing “perverse ideas” from Europe, scores of gay men who were on the Queen Boat — a nightclub housed in a boat that floats on the Nile — were arrested, tried, and no doubt violated in 2001 when police raided the nightclub; the men where portrayed as “satanists.”

Mimi Hanaoka