Inji Aflatoun

Inji Aflatoun (also spelled as Efflatoun, ; 16 April 1924 – 17 April 1989) was an Egyptian painter and activist in the women's movement. She was a "leading spokeswoman for the Marxist-progressive-nationalist-feminist movement in the late 1940s and 1950s", as well as a "pioneer of modern Egyptian art" and "one of the important Egyptian visual artists".

Early life

Aflatoun was born in Cairo in 1924 into a traditional Muslim family she described as "semi-feudal and bourgeois", her father, Hassan Efflatoun, was an entomologist and a landowner, their last name, meaning Plato, was a nickname that had replaced their original family name of Kashef. Her mother,Salha, divorced Hassan at eighteen and raised Inji and her older sister Gulperie. She was a French-trained dress-designer and she served in the Egyptian Red Crescent Society women's committee. Aflatoun's early awareness of gender and social inequality was shaped in part by the life of her mother, Salha Efflatoun. Married at fourteen and divorced at nineteen, the same year Inji was born. Salha faced significant social and economic challenges. In 1936, she became one of Egypt’s pioneering female entrepreneurs by founding the country’s first fashion house, Maison Salha. Backed by nationalist banker Talaat Harb, the business promoted locally produced textiles and represented a new model of female independence through creative labor and nationalist economics. Inji Aflatoun went to school first at the Catholic school Le Collège du Sacré-Coeur. At this school she felt restricted and began to notice social injustice feeling that "there was not even equality before God." At fourteen she transferred to another school where she discovered Marxism at the Lycée Français du Caire . During her time there she was also exposed to students of different backgrounds and learned of the French Revolution and Napoleon's invasion of Egypt and it's impacts on the upper class in Egypt. She became more militant in her actions and increasingly questioned the division between rich and poor. During school, Aflatoun liked to paint and her parents encouraged her but she found the art teachers at her school uninteresting. However, around this time her work was shown to the painter Mahmoud Said who encouraged her Mother to get her a tutor. It was her private art tutor, Kamel el-Telmissany, who introduced her to the life and the struggles of the Egyptian peasants. Al-Telmissany was one of the founders of the 'Art and Freedom Group,' a surrealist movement that would have an impact on Aflatoun's development as an artist.

activism

In 1942, she joined ''Iskra'', a Communist youth party. After graduating from the Fuad I University in Cairo with a degree in philosophy, she became, alongside Latifa al-Zayyat, a founding member in 1945 of the ''Rabitat Fatayat at jami'a wa al ma' ahid'' (League of university and Institutes' Young Women). In 1945 she also campaigned for equal wages and work for women and that same year she represented the League at the first conference of Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF) in Paris. She was an active member of the WIDF as the group helped push for a legally binding treaty to protect against the discrimination of women. She wrote Thamanun milyun imraa ma'ana (Eighty Million Women with Us) in 1948 and the pamphlets were confiscated upon release however were redistributed after Aflatoun sued the Ministry of Interior. This work recounted the WIDF conference it connected different struggles and systems of oppression as well as refleced internationalist ideas. She also wrote Nahnu al-nisa al-misriyyat (We Egyptian Women) in 1949. These popular political pamphlets linked class and gender oppression, connecting both to imperialist oppression. She also wrote about the importance of education for women and the lack of women as teachers, as well as addressing issues of patriarchy in Egyptian "customs, laws, and traditions". Then in 1949, she became a founding member of the First Congress of the First Peace Council of Egypt. She joined Harakat ansar al salam (Movement of the Friends of Peace) in 1950. In 1950 she also created and distributed pamphlets for women's suffrage. In 1951 she co-founded a women's council against British colonialism in Egypt supporting armed resistance and organizing boycotts. She also created paintings at this time that reflected the harm caused by colonial rule especially to women. Aflatoun continued to write on issues that faced women into the later 1950s, such as in 1958 when she raised issues of paid maternity leave and lack of attention to women's health. She was arrested and secretly imprisoned during Nasser's roundup of communists in 1959. She was among the first group of women to be imprisoned for political activism in Egypt, which she later described as symbolic of women's growing political power during the Nasser era. In a 1987 interview, she reflected that the imprisonment of women for political beliefs signified not repression alone, but also recognition of women's political agency and equality with men. She continued painting while in prison and was released on July 26, 1963. After her release, Egypt's Communist party having been dissolved, she devoted most of her time to painting. She later declared: "Nasser, although he put me in prison, was a good patriot."

Artistic influences

Her private art tutor, Kamel el-Telmissany, a leader in an Egyptian Surrealist collective called the Art and Freedom Group, introduced her to surrealist and cubist aesthetics.
When speaking of her Tutor's influence, Aflatoun said that his care and encouragement helped her to move past the barriers that were holding her back. The Art and Freedom Group, or Jama’at al-Fann wa al-Hurriya in Arabic, was highly political and had connections to the larger International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art first established in Mexico. The group held exhibitions of their work and published the text ‘Long Live Degenerate Art!’ (Yahya al-Fann al-Munhatt) as a response to Nazi propaganda and rising fascism. Her paintings of that period are influenced by surrealism. Her early paintings explored surrealist themes, often depicting haunting landscapes, dream imagery, and psychological tensions that reflected gender and class anxieties.Lenssen, 2016. She later recalled that people were astonished by her paintings and wondered "why a girl from a rich family was so tormented". Aflatoun was also influenced by the literature of the Art and Freedom Group, especially the writing of Albert Cossery and Georges Henein. She was part of two of the group's exhibitions before her interests shifted to a more realistic style to create more of a social commentary. She stopped painting from 1946 to 1948, considering that what she was painting no longer corresponded to her feelings. Also in 1948, Aflatoun married Muhammed Abdul Elija, or Hamdi, who was an activist and public prosecutor who was from a poor family. Her interest was later renewed after visiting Luxor, Nubia, and the Egyptian oases

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