Questioning of Stable Gender Roles in Tawfiq Al-Hakim’s The Song of Death

This paper is a critique of conventional gender roles in Tawfiq Al-Hakim’s The Song of Death. The research presents Hakim’s challenge to the masculinity especially in Arabian Islamic culture that is guided by revengeful motive of mother. Being a woman, Asakir is guided by the patriarchal motif of revenge i.e., an eye for an eye. It is Asakir, a widow who ironically thinks that version of masculinity has to be preserved by her in order to do so she makes her son Ilwan take revenge on his father’s murderer but in vain. Ilwan is represented as one of the modernists guided by social norms, decorum and laws. In order to critique the conventional notion of masculinity, the research makes use of theoretical insights of Judith Butler, Judith Halberstam and some ideas from others. Finally, the research concludes that Hakim is critical of conventional masculinity. The mother is presented as a strong advocate of masculinity but her failure at the end of the play ironically displays the implacability of gender-based roles in modern society like that of Cairo.


Introduction
This project dealing with the social issue like status quo, focuses on Tawfiq al Hakim's The Song of Death which challenges the conventional masculinity. Asakir and Mabruka are the representatives of older generation whereas Ilwan stands for the younger generation. They have different mindsets which causes the contradiction in their respective beliefs. Older generation people like Asakir and Mabruka want to stick with the Egyptian norms and values but younger generation like Ilwan tends to shift from tradition. This research explores the failure of conventional masculinity through the study of Asakir and her motive of taking revenge on her husband's murder. This project shows the ongoing conflict between two ideologies. One is of older generation of people who want to remain and preserve old Egyptian tradition and other is new generation of people who believe that the Egyptian rural society can do better in dealing with different problems of people of rural Egypt with help of modern way of thinking. The present study seeks to analyze the characters to bring into the frame of critical analysis that represents the tendency of the then Egyptian rural society.
Gender role is a social role encompassing a range of behaviors and attitudes that are generally considered acceptable, appropriate or desirable for people based on their actual sex.
Gender roles are usually centered on conceptions of femininity and masculinity. The Song of Death is set in domestic context. The play is a story of revenge and a generational conflict between a mother and her son in the Egyptian family. Asakir, the main female character of the play wants her son Ilwan to revenge his father's murderer. But her son strongly refuses her. The disappointment leads the mother up to the stage of killing of her own son. Asakir orders her nephew, Simeida to kill her son, Ilwan. The Tahawi had killed Asakir's husband for killing his father. It means that the revenge is set as a cycle from generation to generation between the two families, Azizes and Tahawi. The turn of revenge comes to Ilwan but he SMART  wants to stop this revenge and wants peace, prosperity and harmony between the people. The generational conflict seems apparent here in understanding level of mother and son.
The protagonist of the play, Ilwan represents the modern and educated man. On the other hand, his mother, cousin and his aunt represent the traditional and uneducated people.
They give important value to the revenge and familial dignity but Ilwan gives value to the modern way of life, humanity and peace which is the main contradiction between them.
Every society has the feature of contradiction between two generations in different levels.
Robert Bly for example sees masculinity as being damaged by the conditions of modern society, and prescribes a remedy in the form of men only retreats and bonding rituals.
"In contrast, from the more critical, academic perspective of the social sciences, masculinities are understood as a form of power relation, both among men themselves and between men and women" (35). Masculinities are argued to arise from the social contexts in which men live for example from their positions in the various institutions and social organizations of their society and or in the context of the socially available discourses about gender. Gender roles play an important role in society whether it is for good or for bad. These roles have been placed in society since the beginning of time. The term gender is socially created and it therefore differentiates men from women. How is gender defined, and what makes it different from the term sex? Sex refers to the biological characteristics that distinguish women and men. Gender refers to the social and cultural characteristics that distinguish women from men. It is completely social construct where biological differences have no any concern. Gender role is grounded in the supposition that individuals socially identified as males and females tend to occupy different ascribed roles within social structures and tend to be judged against divergent expectations for how they ought to behave.

Theory and Textual Analysis
The terms sex and gender are sometimes used interchangeably, although there is a clear distinction between the two. Gender is known to be socially constructed and is learned through social interactions and through the influences of the people around us. Gender roles are therefore set of behaviors that are considered appropriate or acceptable for a man and for a woman, exclusively. These roles are socially created as well. "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman."(30). For example, men play football and women play volleyball. Gender neutrality on the other hand is a term that is trying to push out these socially constructed roles. In most of the cases, urban people are shown themselves as modernist whereas rural people as traditionalist. Even within the people themselves there we can find a kind of quarrel whether they should call themselves as modernist or traditionalist because those new urban people sometimes identify themselves as urban people and some other time they get nearer to rural values. The discrepancies with new values and old values were seen in Egyptian societies in the mid twentieth century.
Hakim shows a kind of quarrel or disagreement explicitly in his play The Song of Death. In the play, Asakir wants to continue the tradition of revenge which she thinks is a very honorable for her family. So, she says to her son, "Of course you have not come here for food or drink. You have come to eat of his flesh and drink of his blood" (57). Here, in her speech we can easily know that she wants to continue the tradition of revenge which is very easy and safe because of the culture of revenge they had been practicing for a long time. It is the reason that she directly tries to convince her son to revenge his father's murderer. But the son asks for the proofs of his father's murderer.
I know you have told me that. You have told that name to me over and over again, whenever you came to visit me in Cairo. I was too young to think then or to argue.
But now my reason needs to be satisfied. What's the evidence? Have you ever tried to go beyond perusing me? I don't think this is the job of mine. Did the police ever look into the crime? (83) In surface it seems that mother is the protagonist of the play who is guided by the male motifs. Asakir has adopted the male decorum fully in her life. The above-mentioned words of Ilwan are very strong enough to show his clash with the older generation and their thought of revenge. He strongly believes in the social justice. Ilwan complains to his mother that from the times past he was compelled to listen and get ready for the revenge with the one who The misapprehension about gender performativity is this: that gender is a choice, or that gender is a role, or that gender is a construction that one puts one, as one puts on clothes in the morning, that there is a 'one' who is prior to this gender, a one who goes to the wardrobe of gender and decides with deliberation which gender it will be today. (23) SMART MOVES JOURNAL IJELLH Butler is of the view that society has misconception regarding the gender. The phrase 'gender is a social construct' itself is biased. There shouldn't be one who makes other wear the gendered cloths cut in his own fits. No gender is prior or inferior to other. As a result, "gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/ cultural means by which 'sexed nature' or a 'natural sex' is produced and established as 'prediscursive', prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts" (24). Ilwan rejects his mother's familial law of tradition in the following conversation with his mother: Ilwan: [raises his head and takes courage] Mother, I will not kill.
Asakir: [tries to conceal her distress] What do I hear?
Ilwan: I will not kill. The aforementioned conversation is the crucial illustration of how Asakir who is guided by male notions of revenge. Thinking in the pattern of male she if firm to make her son take revenge but that goes in vain as Ilwan does not only reject his mother's plan rather he blames his own mother for concealing the case from government authorities. As a modern man he wants the punishment from legal court. So, he dislikes the culture of blood feud against the expectations of society from a male.
Carlyle's fantasy of male-bonding is not without its problems. Every conception of gender is constructed and it is inherently problematic and can be inverted and challenged in different ways. "Maleness, potentially progressive, is also innately diseased. The very spring of male identity is also potentially the source of its destruction as dissolution" (24). Our very understanding and discourse of one gender can be the source of its own unmaking. One possible interpretation is that the woman in masquerade wishes for masculinity in order to engage in public discourse with men and as a man as part of a male homoerotic exchange.
And precisely because that male homoerotic exchange would signify castration, she fears the same retribution that motivates the 'defenses' of the homosexual man.
Furthermore, Asakir is very distressed about her son as she does not convince him in her project of revenge. At the same time, she is able to convince her Nephew, Simeida to kill her own son who finally becomes their enemy. In this context it is very applicable to bring a short conversation between Asakir and Simeida: Asakir: Our hope is now in you, Simeida.
Simeida: A nephew can stand in for a son.
Asakir: But in this case the son's alive. It's his duty before anybody else to avenge the shedding of his father's blood. He's alive… Simeida: Just try to tell yourself that he's dead.
Asakir: I wish he had really died, drowned in the sluice of the waterwheel when he was a child…I wish he had truly died. We would have been able to live honorably then, and not be wearing our garments of shame. But he is alive, and it has been broadcast in the market places and in the whole neighborhood that he is alive. Oh, the shame. The ignominy. Disgrace! (404) As traditional people always try to convince young generation of people in traditional values and beliefs Asakir also tried her son to bring him in her way of thinking but she failed in her mission. So, she laments about her son's birth and curses his birth. At that time her nephew comes to support her and works as her son in her favor. In this way, Simeida seems as a lost young generation who becomes the victim of traditional belief and ruins his brother's and his own life in vain.
In the play too we can easily notice the cultural transition as Ilwan wants to adopt the urban culture which he has been internalizing for a long period of time in Cairo. We also see think of meditation amidst of war scene? Such thoughts of mother are all loopholes that are fasten to strengthen the conventional masculinity but that ultimately goes in vain. In the conversation, Asakir, the mother of Ilwan stands for traditional religion, Islam but her son is against her religion. So, she says that her son talks about his book but in reality, it doesn't work. She tells him to follow her traditional religion in which ritual washing before prayer is obligatory. She is static in the level that she does not believe on her son's study and believes that her son is only speaking the language of the books. Her son Ilwan, changes his traditional religion and becomes Sheikh which the mother never takes positively.
There is conflict between older generation and new generation because old people are attached to their culture, tradition and their roots. This orthodoxy has its own system that Humankind is changeable and it changes according to time and space. There is certainly conflict between two different generations that represent different time span, and it is there in At last, in the play, the protagonist, Ilwan is murdered by his brother, Simeida when his mother forces him to kill her own son. The face of mother after killing her own son is in a sense counter to conventional masculinity. The tradition here becomes the curse for people and especially for the new generation like Ilwan in traditionally biased society of rural Egypt.
Simeida is the son who stayed behind and he also is a tragic figure. His future is entirely destroyed by Asakir. He is certain to be punished, perhaps executed, for the murder of Ilwan.
So that, he is an example of a lost generation denied the chance of the enlightenment of the new ideology of the state and of the city. In Simeida, we see the relentless pendulum logic of the tribal vendetta law. Here also we can see the clear effect of tradition in the case of Simeida. In the play he is compelled to kill his brother because of the force of her aunt in the name of masculinity. Being of young generation he was compelled to kill other young generation because of the traditionally conservative unyielding passion for vengeance.
In Female Masculinity, Judith Halberstam takes aim at the protected status of male masculinity and shows that female masculinity has offered a distinct alternative to it for well over two hundred years. Providing the first full-length study on this subject, Halberstam catalogs "the diversity of gender expressions among masculine women from nineteenthcentury pre-lesbian practices to contemporary drag king performances" (80). This shows there are multiple manifestations of masculinities and it is always possible that women can act like men and men kind behave like women. The roles played by the mother and the son in

Conclusion
Killing of Ilwan by Simeida is the proof Hakim presents very tactfully to critique the conventional masculinity that is based on revenge. Asakir is represented as one of the failures to uphold the male convention in face; it is the failure of conventional masculinity. She is unable to make her son walk in her dream of revenge means the complete disaster upon all the notions based on biased conventional masculinity. Among many issues, challenge to masculinity is the major issue the research has delved into. The play ends in abhorrent surprises for both Asakir and the readers. Ilwan surprises his mother who was waiting for seventeen years for avenging her husband's murder, refusing to kill. His own mother surprises him by ordering his cousin to kill him. The son abstains from killing despite being a male and the mother is in favor of killing despite the fact that she is a woman. This is against our understanding of traditional gender roles and serves to challenge the stability of traditional gender roles. The act of order to kill his own son is very much meaningful in the play. The research finally concludes the actions of both mother and son jointly prove the failure of conventional masculinity.