Eighty Million Women Stand with Us . Inji Efflatoun, Egyptian feminism, and the Women’s International Democratic Federation

This article explores feminist translation through a discussion of Egyptian artist and activist Inji Efflatoun’s Arabic language report on the founding Congress of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF), held in Paris in 1945. Her report Thamanun milyun imraʾa maʿana (in English Eighty Million Women Stand With Us), initially banned by the Egyptian authorities, brings together photos, summaries of speeches, biographical and historical notes, expository passages and Congress resolutions. Tracing the forgotten history of the WIDF allows me to reflect on the politics of archives in relation to feminist history. I consider the report, itself an Arabic rewriting of the French official proceedings of the Congress, as an act of translation from source to target language, but also from the international to the national, and back again. The article models the feminist translator’s engagement with history and historiography through what Aoife O’Donoghue has called ‘radical remembering’ (in my own case, when translating the Arabic into English), a practice that seeks to remedy ‘the aphasia’ governing the deliberate silence around women’s transformational work. In this way, I consider how feminist translation can participate in recovering marginalised histories while also questioning the ways in which those histories are constructed.