Taheya Karioka

My favourite belly dancer

As many of you know, I grew up in Beirut and went to school there in a French convent. In those days, we were all very much looking to the west for everything, from education to entertainment. In fact, my sisters used to call me Salut les Copains after a French entertainment magazine that was all about Johnny Halliday, Francoise Hardy and France Gall to name a few and which I religiously subscribed to. And in those days, if we had wanted to mock a girl who we thought was vulgar, we would say she was like Taheya Karioka, which was the height of stupidity given that Taheya was anything but vulgar.

Later, long after I had moved to London, I learned to love Umm Kulthum, the ultimate Arab diva - actually it was in Tangiers that I first understood the appeal of those long repetitive songs - and soon after, I also learned to love belly dancers, and in particular Taheya who may well be the greatest of them all and is definitely my favourite. Samia Gamal comes close but Taheya remains the goddess of belly dancing, to the point that Edouard Said wrote a whole essay about her and one observation that struck me was how she never looked directly at her audience. Belly dancing can be quite lascivious and by looking at a particular man in the audience, the dancer could be suggesting more than just flirtatious thoughts! Not for Taheya. In this clip from the film Taht el-Shibbak (Below the Window), she is fully dressed and her hairdo is very elegant but her movement is mezmerizingly sensual and the only vulgar thing one could accuse her of is how she is chewing gum although I find it quite endearing despite me hating gum chewers with a passion.

Still, I can only rue how I once equated her name with vulgarity when she is so divine. Her presence on stage or as in the clip above, in a drawing room, is totally captivating, not only because of how beautiful she is but also for all that she conveys through her dancing, both in the way she controls her body and her exultation in it.