Inji Efflatoun: White Light

The Egyptian artist Inji Efflatoun (1924-1989) is widely recognized as a major avant-garde figure in Egyptian modernist history as well as a feminist activist who petitioned for women’s suffrage, amendments to family law, and for worker’s rights. Perhaps most famously, she was among the first cohort of women to be arrested as a political prisoner; she served a four-year sentence under President Gamal Abdel Nasser for her work with the Egyptian Communist Party (1959-1963). Most scholarship on Efflatoun has followed the artist’s autobiographical narrative in treating the artist’s dual activities – political action and artistic practice – as essentially opposed. This essay proposes an adjustment to this frame, arguing instead for recognizing the artist’s theoretically-informed response to gendered somatophobia (fear of the body) as a central aspect of both commitments. The essay examines the darkness of Efflatoun’s early surrealist paintings as a pairing with the «white light» of her 1970s paintings, thereby revealing the artist’s ongoing inquiry into possibilities for kinship based on copresence rather than appearance.