Mansura, a provincial capital in the Nile Delta, is too small to harbour the ambitions of the would-be singer and entertainer il-Ḥilwa ʿAzīza (lit. ‘Pretty Aziza’ or ‘Pretty Darling’). Encouraged by her good looks, her indomitable baladī sass, and a constant entourage of admirers, she sets off for the lights and glamour of Cairo without a doubt in her mind that fame and fortune will be soon to follow. Her dreams are shattered, however, when on a return visit to her hometown, a local suitor she once rejected surprises her at the train station and hurls a bottle of acid in her face. ‘Pretty ʿAzīza!’ he shouts in the manner demanded by B-grade drama, ‘You won't be pretty any more!’ The man and his accomplice are tackled by passersby, but the deed is done, and ʿAzīza, her face now horribly disfigured, finds work as a nightclub manager while she plots her revenge.

This rather conventional tale of city-bound, recalcitrant femininity and provincial, take-it-or-leave-it masculine pride – dramatised in the 1969 film il- Ḥilwa ʿAzīza (dir. Ḥasan al-Imām) – would be unremarkable, were it not for the names behind the roles: playing ʿAzīza, the famed diva and star of the silver screen Hind Rustum (1931–2011), and, as her assailant, the poet and playwright Naguib Surur (1932–78). While the role was a familiar one for Rustum, it was for Surur his sole cameo appearance in film, and a performance that would soon be forgotten amidst his many and mighty contributions to modern Egyptian literature. That is not to say that he was acting out of character. After graduating from the Higher Institute for Dramatic Arts in Cairo in 1956, Surur would begin to draw attention to himself as an uncompromising son of Egypt (in particular, his native village of Akhṭāb), who was capable of answering his critics and oppressors through unique, if not unprecedented in the history of Arabic literature, expressions of vengeance and spite. This was a persona that Surur fashioned for himself both in poetry – as in his debut ode ‘al-Ḥidhāʾ’ (‘The Shoe’) (1956), which tells of a violent encounter between a villager (Surur's father) and a local landowner – and in public, as when he delivered a fiery speech against the Egyptian and Syrian ‘dictatorships’ while a student in Moscow in 1959.