Suez Canal at 70: The music, films, art and literature that tell its story

With July 26 marking 70 years since Egyptian President <a href="https://www.thenationalnews.com/world/legend-of-gamal-abdel-nasser-lives-on-in-cairos-new-museum-1.26026" target="_blank" rel="" title="https://www.thenationalnews.com/world/legend-of-gamal-abdel-nasser-lives-on-in-cairos-new-museum-1.26026">Gamal Abdel Nasser</a> announced the nationalisation of the <a href="https://www.thenationalnews.com/business/energy/2026/07/24/middle-east-chokepoints-in-focus-as-us-iran-war-escalates/" target="_blank" rel="" title="https://www.thenationalnews.com/business/energy/2026/07/24/middle-east-chokepoints-in-focus-as-us-iran-war-escalates/">Suez Canal</a>, the man-made waterway remains etched in <a href="https://www.thenationalnews.com/arts-culture/2026/07/16/what-is-the-rosetta-stone-and-why-does-egypt-want-it-back/" target="_blank" rel="" title="https://www.thenationalnews.com/arts-culture/2026/07/16/what-is-the-rosetta-stone-and-why-does-egypt-want-it-back/">Egyptian culture</a> and national memory seven decades on. Nasser's decision was followed by an invasion by Britain, France and Israel three months later. The forces eventually withdrew, and the company remained under Egyptian control. Already celebrated as a feat of engineering, the canal became an enduring symbol of sovereignty and resistance. Often missing from this mainstream story of national history are the experiences of communities in Port Said, Ismailia and Suez. The three cities grew around or alongside the waterway, while the lives of their residents were shaped and upended by labour, war and displacement. Egyptian artists have told and retold these experiences, along with the lives of the political figures involved, through music, film, visual art and literature. Several of these traditions will be represented in Ismailia on July 26, when the fourth Simsimiyya Forum opens at Ismailia Culture Palace. The event brings together ensembles from the canal cities and other parts of Egypt to perform music rooted in the region. Here are some ways in which the Suez Canal has been represented across Egyptian culture. The construction of the Suez Canal helped spread a distinctive Egyptian folk genre. Simsimiyya, named after its signature stringed instrument, and storytelling lyrics about life and romance beside the waterway, were carried by workers from Upper Egypt, Nubia and Sudan who arrived to dig the canal in the 19th century. Played by labourers, sailors and fishermen, the music accompanies social gatherings called damma, where performers form a circle around a lead singer. These took on a political purpose during the 1956 invasion. The traditional Port Said song <i>Fi Port Said Shabab Wa Rigal</i> (In Port Said, Youth and Men) describes fighting, blocked navigation and cuts to Port Said’s water and electricity. The song captured how the battle for the canal entered daily life. After the 1967 war, groups such as Awlad El Ard sang for families displaced from the canal. Their song <i>Bokra Hatirga Tani</i> (<i>Tomorrow You Will Return Again)</i> promised them that they would see their homes and fields once more. The repertoire was revived in the late 1980s by El Tanbura, a band founded by Zakaria Ibrahim in Port Said to collect songs from older performers, and bring them to audiences in Egypt and abroad. In 2024, the simsimiyya was added to Unesco’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity through a joint nomination by Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Egyptian cinema and television have placed the Suez Canal at the centre of dramas about nationalisation, espionage and local resistance. These works made the events surrounding the waterway part of popular history. The 1957 film <i>Port Said</i>, starring Farid Shawqi, dramatises the city’s resistance during the invasion of Egypt by Britain, France and Israel. Released within a year of the conflict, it shows how the struggle for the canal brought war into local streets and neighbourhoods. The 1996 black-and-white film <i>Nasser 56</i>, in which Ahmed Zaki starred as the Egyptian president, examines the pivotal moments that led to the crisis. Egyptian artists have examined the canal through the labour that went into building it and the political struggle to control it. Hamed Ewais’s 1957 oil painting <i>Nasser and the Nationalisation of the Canal</i> presents the announcement as a public victory. Nasser’s enlarged figure stands among a crowd celebrating on the bank of the waterway. Abdel Hadi El Gazzar took a more circumspect view in his 1965 work <i>Construction of the Suez Canal</i>. Exhausted Egyptian labourers work among machinery, exposing the human cost beneath the celebrated feat of engineering. The painting was commissioned for the Maritime Museum in Alexandria and later entered the collection of Museum of Modern Egyptian Art in Cairo. El Gazzar’s study was sold by Christie’s in Dubai in 2014 for $1.02 million. At the canal’s northern entrance in Port Said, the empty pedestal of Ferdinand de Lesseps marks a continuing dispute over the city’s colonial past. Created by French sculptor Emmanuel Fremiet, the French Orientalist diplomat's statue was installed in 1899 and toppled by Port Said residents after the 1956 war. The statue was restored in 1989 and moved in 2020 to the Suez Canal Museum in Ismailia. The wars fought over the canal entered Egyptian literature through stories of political awakening, damaged neighbourhoods and families forced from their homes. Latifa Al Zayyat’s 1960 novel <i>The Open Door</i> follows Layla, a young woman whose political awakening unfolds alongside Egypt’s anti-colonial movement and culminates in Port Said during the 1956 invasion. Her participation in the resistance connects the defence of the canal zone to her rejection of restrictions at home. In Zein Abdel Hady’s 2022 autobiographically inspired novel <i>The War in the East</i>, the author draws on his childhood in Port Said to recall its working-class neighbourhoods, cultural mixture and his family’s departure after the 1967 war. The canal’s transformation into a front line is measured by damaged homes and a scattered community. In her 2022 essay <i>Those Who Carried Their Lives in Suitcases</i>, Afnan Fuhayd uses family testimony to trace her family’s repeated departures from Port Said beginning in 1967. The testimony records the experience of canal families largely absent from academic histories of the crisis.