Love, Romance and Fiction: Why Turkish delights have invaded Egyptian TV
By Imane Fawzy Nofal
Have you ever wondered why a first kiss will always count? Because its details remain engraved in one’s subconscious. So when you close your eyes, you recollect the first touch of hands, feel how you two got close, how the warm breaths breezed into each other’s face, and the first touch of those lips. The beauty of a first kiss lies in that it is about emotions rather than desires. It is the same as a first dance where your heartbeat sores not with the tempo, but with your partner’s wrapping of his hands around your waist and coming close to your body.
Lots of firsts are special because of their unique impact on our senses and emotions. Our memories of such unwind like a movie scene in slow motion, taking our minds out of the realm of time and reality. So whatever only takes minutes in our virtual world knocks at our hearts endlessly, adding up to hours of good memories and ages of remembrance until we die.
This fits very much into the black and white cinema and TV series of old days where the tempo of life was indeed as slow as to encompass such peaceful scenarios. These black and white series are still popular today despite the fast pace of current times. I enjoy watching a black and white melodramatic movie full of quiet and unbelievable coincidences … just like those passionate about world classics continue to love to read Dickens’ novel Oliver Twist which goes into unexpected melodramatic curves.
For ages, Egyptian social media has occupied a main and essential space in the Arab world. This could either be due to Egypt’s political leading position or due to its flavorful, high class cinematographic and TV products. This might explain why the Egyptian dialect is understood in the whole Arab world including its jokes and clichés.
In recent times, famous actresses and actors from the old times have been engraved in the history books of Egyptian cinema; each one reserving his heroic place in a series tailored specifically to portray how he wants to see himself, which I often find to be sometimes silly, at other times realistic, sadistic and boring. It is worth noting that each of these actors and actress visualizes themselves as the savior of society and humanity. The new generation on the other hand lacks the talent and experience in a way that makes their collective cooperative efforts usually flavorless and boring. I have deviated from watching them.
Yet recently like everyone else in this part of the world, I have witnessed the invasion of Turkish series (soap operas as they are known in America) dubbed into Lebanese or Syrian Arabic dialect. Not a fan of soap operas, I did not watch for sometime … in fact, I used to mock those who did, simply because I thought of them as unreal, long and melodramatic.
They say the tasting is in the eating … well to my surprise, I have spent the last 60 days or more eagerly watching Fatmagul! Huh! Me! While my point of view has not changed in that I still think of them as too drawn out, emotional, and fictionalized, they are well produced, presented and professionally dubbed.
So what is it about these series that have attracted Egyptians from their traditional supposedly famous series into such new unfamiliar territory? Is it the fact that we yearn for slow, romantic and exaggerated plots? As humans, we voluntarily let ourselves to be drawn into very emotional worlds where the good triumphs over the evil, where the lover sacrifices all for his beloved and where the stress and bitterness of the world vanish and melt away.
I really don’t know if I will watch any other series, but I felt so obliged to honor those Turkish people who are able to shoot in colorful modern scenes what we lack in our modern world infusing them with the beauty of the black and white series.
Imane blogs at Express It 2 Live It
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