Reda Kazan
Reda Kazan | |
|---|---|
 | |
| President of Gylias | |
| In office 1 June 1961 – 1 February 1982 | |
| Prime Minister | Darnan Cyras Aén Ďanez |
| Succeeded by | Len Resis |
| Personal details | |
| Born | Reðe Kazansides 18 October 1918 Arlyka, Xevden |
| Died | 9 January 1991 (aged 72) Velouria, Nerveiík-Iárus-Daláyk, Gylias |
| Nationality | Gylian |
| Political party | Independent |
| Occupation |
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Reda Kazan (Hellene reformed: Rέδα Καζάɴ; 18 October 1918 – 9 January 1991) was a Gylian singer, songwriter, dancer, actress, and politician. She was an iconic figure of the Liberation War, becoming its most successful entertainer, and served as the first President of Gylias from 1961 to 1982.
Reda's music combined simple guitar techniques with defiant lyrics, steeped in ribaldry and gallows humour. She toured the Free Territories intensely during the war, and was popular with both People's Army soldiers and civilians. She also acted in a series of films that capitalised on her glamorous sex symbol persona, particularly her celebrated collaborations with Ellen Powell that showcased their dance talents.
Reda's association with the war reduced her audience after its end, but her career continued. She performed regularly as a nightclub act and continued to work as an actress, coming to be associated with elegant rake characters. As the first President of Gylias, she is credited with imbuing the office with prestige and dignity, making it a permanent part of Gylian politics.
Diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, she helped draw attention to the disease, before undergoing voluntary euthanasia in 1991.
Early life
She was born Reðe Kazansides (Hellene reformed: Ρέδε Καζαɴςίδες) on 18 October 1918 in Arlyka, a village in the Salxar mountains. Her mixed Hellene–Gylic descent is reflected in her name; she identified foremost as Hellene throughout her life.
Her parents were travelling entertainers. The family was poor, and she did not attend school. She learned to read and write from her parents, but found it difficult. She was functionally illiterate into her teenage years, and remained dyslexic as an adult. She began learning to play the guitar and dance at an early age, and started performing with her parents.
The family's peripatetic existence both gave her abundant time to practice, while the disreputable milieu they lived in would shape her public persona. She admired Madame Rouge growing up, and modelled her personality and writing style after her. She gave her first solo performance at 18, when her parents were arrested before a scheduled concert. She went through with the show and used her payment to pay her parents' bail.
Liberation War
Reda said the family was "in the right place and right time" when the Liberation War began: the area initially captured by the People's Army. The initial experience of authoritarian socialism disgusted Reda, and she welcomed the proclamation of the Free Territories.
She continued to perform professionally, while her parents worked on the home front and supported her career. She simplified her stage name to "Reda Kazan" — her first name now mirroring her own pronunciation. She found her voice as a songwriter and assumed the persona of a Madame Rouge-styled decadent temptress.
Throughout the war, Reda toured the Free Territories, performing for soldiers and civilians alike wherever she could. Her insistence on performing at the front lines was both reckless and brave, and won her admiration. In between touring, she maintained a busy schedule: recording songs, acting in films, and appearing on radio broadcasts and comedy programs. This cemented her association with wartime entertainment.
Musical style
Reda's primary instrument was the acoustic guitar. She tuned her guitar to Open C. She generally avoided fingerpicking in favour of vigorous rhythm guitar.
Most of her songs were in a folk style, and she sometimes incorporated influences from cabaret, music hall, jazz, and blues.
Reda's lyrics were the main attraction of her songs: witty, satirical, and bawdy. Their effect was completed by her deadpan delivery and fondness for unexpectedly filthy language. She wrote mainly in her native Hellene, Yaskan and Rezakan, with abundant code-switching and isolated words from other Gylic languages. She also performed in English and French on occasion, with a thick accent.
Her war-themed songs used sarcastic lyrics and boisterous performance to convey a spirit of defiant determination. One of the best examples is "Soldier's Song", whose verses deliver a motor-mouthed litany of the indignities of military service before culminating in a rousing, profanity-laden chorus that ironically asserts how great it is to be a soldier. Other songs used sharp humour to condemn the brutality of war, such as "My Friend, the Grenade Launcher", and "First We Kill Everyone, Then We'll Have Peace".
Her sexually-oriented material saw her play the part of an irresistible worldly seductress to the hilt, with tongue in cheek. Themes ranged from the unapologetic pride of promiscuity to parodying the anxieties of whether romantic relationships would survive the separation caused by military service.
Reda also wrote straightforward comedic songs, where she could show off her storytelling and wordplay abilities. Apart from her songs, she performed covers of folk songs, sea shanties, and contemporary blues and novelty songs. She wrote musical adaptations of poems by Madame Rouge and Phaedra Metaxa; the two became close friends as a result, and Phaedra even wrote poems specifically for her to sing.
She avoided ballads and torch songs, finding them sentimental and inappropriate for soldiers. In a 1946 interview, she said:
"I think the last thing somebody wants to hear after a day of shooting, tank blasts, artillery, triage, and death stalking your every moment is some music hall nonsense written by a recruiting sergeant, or something to cry over how you left your loved ones at home."
Performance
Reda's shows included music, dance, and comedy. She accompanied herself on guitar for her own performances, and used either other musicians or gramophone recordings for her dance segments.
She had a mischievous stage presence. She playfully winked to punctuate certain lines, bantered with the audience between songs, and introduced songs with humorous anecdotes and double entendres.
During her dance segments, she would go into the audience and pick random members on the spot to serve as her partners.
Acting
Reda acted in a series of Free Territories films. Most were recorded with a low budget and an experimental approach, contrasting with her classical glamour.
Her characters formed a recognisable type. They were good-natured and exuberant, bound by a strong sense of right and wrong, and also alluring seductresses who enjoyed their "wicked" behaviour and reveled in their ability to get their way. Keie Nanei described Reda's characters as "the epitome of wish fulfillment": "they had the joie de vivre of a sweet child, the exuberance of a brilliant commedienne, an irresistible sex appeal to die for, and a boundless generosity that would draw people even closer."
She acted in many musical films, which were best suited for showcasing her singing and dancing skills. Her collaborations with Ellen Powell were the most critically acclaimed, displaying their complementary dance talents and hearty sexual chemistry.
An unexpected benefit for her film career was that, due to the infusion of Alscian expertise into the Free Territories' film industry, the majority of her surviving films were made with early colour techniques. This made them easier to later restore using colour recovery and more naturalistic processing.
Image
Reda used her public persona as an ideal that would inspire her audience. She had a glamorous appearance and always appeared well-dressed. In the context of wartime rationing, this meant she and her parents, and later her assistants, devoted great inventiveness, prudence, and effort to maintaining her wardrobe and cosmetics.
Her public image was defined by androgynous-looking vêtements utilitaires. She favoured skirt suits because they were easy to wear and maintain, often donned white gloves for their elegant effect, and almost always wore hats. She considered the latter the most important part of her wardrobe. Several of her films drew humour by implying she was less attractive without them.
She jokingly expressed a desire to retain the standards of appearance created during the war, quipping, "Are we fighting a war here just so anyone can just roll out of bed and right out in public?"
She had strabismus, and in fact demanded of camera operators and photographers to highlight this fact when they worked with her.
"Wickedness" was important to Reda's status as a sex symbol. Throughout her oeuvre, she portrayed characters who were irresistibly sultry, and possessed of a strong moral code. The balancing act between her characters' altruism and their naughtiness secured her huge popularity with audience and critical acclaim among reviewers.
One celebrated sequence from Gilda illustrates her characters' quintessential traits: Gilda is shown convincing a man to host her for the night, and charms both him and his wife over dinner, convincing them to try a threesome. In the morning, she cooks them breakfast in gratitude, and kisses them both goodbye before leaving. A safe distance later, she smiles impishly and reveals she secretly took some of their chocolate bars — a rationed good. Later in the film, she's shown sharing the chocolate bars with a young child she's escorting.
Popularity
Reda was by far the most popular and iconic star of the Free Territories. Besides her busy schedule of acting, singing, and broadcasts, she was also periodically photographed for various publications, being in demand as a model. Sofia Westergaard recalled that "No matter where in the Free Territories you traveled, you would see an image of Reda, one of her films, or hear one of her songs." She felt that Gylians embraced Reda as a reassuring and comforting figure — "glamorous and sultry Reda, always getting what she wants, uplifting in her generosity to others, an inspiration that things would be perfect after the war."
Reda embraced her fame with tongue-in-cheek. One of her favourite quips on stage was a variation of "I find it awfully lovely that all you people have come together and are enduring all this shooting and death to fight for the greatest cause of all…making Reda Kazan rich and famous."
Reda's success spawned a "cottage industry" dedicated to maintaining her image and popularity, and some joked that she was among the Free Territories' biggest employers. Phaedra stated that Reda "went everywhere with a small army of personal assistants — clothesmakers and repairers, stylists, make-up artists, photographers, choreographers, sound engineers, and a general number of factotums whose job was to attend to her needs and to get necessary items during wartime."
In some interviews, she revealed a well-read mind and an early interest in politics. In 1948, she stated:
The biggest atrocity of capitalism is the misery and alienation it generates. Thank the gods we've abolished it! I've worked hard to get where I am in life, and still do, but it's for myself, not anyone else. I'm not afraid to ask for help either when I need it. Effort is marvelous — it's for yourself, you see the fruits of your own labour, and you get this feeling of accomplishment and mastery. You don't get that working for someone else, and that's exactly why working for others is so miserable.
Post-war
Reda was present in Velouria when the proclamation of Gylias took place on 2 January 1958. Upon hearing the proclamation, she exclaimed, "Finally, I'll never have to sing 'My Friend, the Grenade Launcher' again!".
She remained active as a musician and actress after the war. However, her close association with it proved disadvantageous. The emergence of modern rock and pop in the 1960s cemented the perception of her musical style as outdated.
She worked mainly as a nightclub act and cabaret performer in small venues. Her show was much the same as before, but her repertoire now excluded her war songs.
Reda continued to appear on screen, and acting became her main source of fame. Her character type increasingly evolved towards an impeccably-dressed, ageing libertine, having lost none of her charm but having grown more comically perverted with age. This earned her comparisons to a non-Francophone Cécile Sorel.
Many Groovy Gylias figures looked up to Reda as a role model for her wartime success, image, and hard-working schedule. She appeared in Brigitte Nyman's Ocean Liner (1960) and Alike Demetriou's The Girl with the Fairy Tales (1961), both times playing the mother of their respective characters.
Later, she was one of many famous people to appear on the cover of The Beaties' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and made a cameo appearance in Magical Mystery Tour.
President of Gylias
Election
With the Constitution of Gylias about to be promulgated, Reda approached the Progressive Alliance and stated her intention to run for the presidency, asking for their backing. The PA enthusiastically agreed to her request. Historian Nina Raukan wrote that Reda's candidacy "unraveled the anarchists' carefully-laid plans for a purely ceremonial, unimportant presidency."
Reda entered the 1961 presidential election as an independent endorsed by the PA. Her iconic stature from the Free Territories, with the PA's support, proved an insurmountable advantage. Her campaign themes included promotion of culture and the arts, support of socialised luxury as rationing was recently abolished, and a promise to use her stature to preserve the Free Territories' revolutionary heritage. This helped her construct a large coalition that propelled her to victory.
Although her victory was somewhat expected, its scale wasn't: she won 50,1% of the first preference vote, obtaining a majority on the first count and winning directly.
She was re-elected in 1968, with a narrow 50,1%–49,9% victory against Ludmila Canaşvili, and in 1975, with a crushing 58,8%–41,2% victory against Maria Elena Durante. She thus became the only president to serve full 7-year terms before term lengths were shortened.
Exercise of office
She was sworn in as the first President of Gylias on 1 June 1961. Her first act was to sign all federal laws passed up to that point as a formality.
Conscious of the weight of precedent, Reda exercised her office in a non-partisan and ceremonial manner, seeing her role as a symbol of the Gylian federation. She proudly noted that she took no important decisions during her presidency: she capably handled the ceremonial aspects of the post, took actions on the advice of the cabinet, and promulgated all laws that reached her desk.
She carried out the diplomatic and representative duties of her office with enthusiasm, much to the relief of Darnan Cyras, who had little patience for ceremony or foreign policy. She traveled often on official visits, nearly as much as foreign minister Erika Ďileş, making the two Gylias' leading ambassadors to the world.
Reda met with the cabinet weekly, a frequency chosen at her initiative, and had a good relationship with the Darnan Cyras government. Darnan Cyras commented that she was "very well-informed about many things and enjoyed both deep discussions and banter". She got on well with the ferroses and made small contributions to the environment surrounding the government, being fond of colourful companions like Violeta Andyriaḑe and Sabina Amorosi.
"President of the people"
Reda expressed her wish to be a "president of the people", and took the duty of safeguarding Gylias' revolutionary heritage seriously. She traveled regularly, visiting all regions once a year, invited ordinary citizens to receptions, and kept her office open to all visitors.
She would invite notable Gylians to meet with her as a substitute for an honours system, which the Constitution specifically forbade.
She frequently exercised her right to address a message to Gylians, speaking on a variety of themes such as democracy, anti-authoritarianism, culture, education, and public service.
Elegant and enthusiastic about mingling with ordinary Gylians, she brought prestige to the office, and established it as a significant presence in Gylian politics.
Themes
The dominant themes of Reda's presidency were promoting culture, the arts, and socialised luxury. She praised the Golden Revolution and Groovy Gylias, asserting that culture should replace military or economic considerations as a measure of a state's contribution to the world. She met with many significant cultural figures, such as the Beaties, Kaida Rakodi, Rauna Næsve, Annemarie Beaulieu, Alisa Marková, and Estelle Thompson, promoting a sense of pride in Gylias' achievements.
She was a high-profile supporter of the hétaïre, and promoted the profession's arts patronage role in particular.
Reputation
Reda cultivated a distinctive image as president. She had humorously used the song "I'm Old Fashioned" during her campaigns, and embraced it as a defining element of her presidency.
While Reda supported left-wing economics and the ideal of social liberation, she demonstrated a sympathy for conservatism in terms of appearance and behaviour. She felt that the anarchists had a dominant role in the Golden Revolution and a "counterbalance" was necessary in order to avoid excesses or abuses.
Taking full advantage of her fastidiously-dressed reputation, Reda expressed strong opinions on Gylian clothing and styles, couched in tongue-in-cheek humour. She praised the de-genderisation of clothing, quipping "Why should women get all the good clothes?", and the abolition of the formal—informal distinction. However, she was firmly opposed to "shabbiness" in public life.
She was known for humorously finger-wagging and chiding public figures she felt were poorly dressed, and sought to lead by example in high standards of appearance. She built close friendships with others who advocated for a similar "beautification" of public life, including Saorlaith Ní Curnín, Ðaina Levysti, Marguerite Tailler, Neelie op het Mensink, and Penelope Morris.
As Reda was careful to present her passion for style in a humorous manner, her advocacy was regarded as a harmless quirk by the public, and contributed to her popularity. She positioned herself as a moderating figure in the Golden Revolution, supporting its egalitarian and direct democratic goals, but promoting restraint and cautioning against excessive indulgence.
During the 1968 campaign, she quipped that both her and Ludmila Canaşvili were united by their support of high appearance standards, and remarked, "No matter which of us wins, we're going to tighten up some dress standards around here." On another occasion, she joked, "I can't wait 'til I win so I can make every day Election Day. I'm going to see you all dolled up nicely, and you'll love it!".
Wretched decade
In contrast to her excellent relationship with the Darnan Cyras government, Reda came into conflict with the Aén Ďanez government. He hated Aén Ďanez's hardliner approach to politics, attacking her obsessive enmity with the Progressive Alliance and "sheer lack of manners".
She privately rebuked Aén during meetings with the cabinet, and forcefully demanded that ministers behave themselves, to no avail. Frustrated by the bitterness of the wretched decade, she gradually reduced the frequency of meetings with the cabinet, seeing them as increasingly fruitless.
Reda had already been planning to retire after her third term as president, and the wretched decade only cemented her decision.
Later life
Reda returned to acting after her presidency, and enjoyed something of a rediscovery among younger audiences during the 1980s. She earned critical acclaim for her role in the mounoir film Softboiled (1984), where she was teamed up with Leonora Weeks.
She was a distinguished guest at the 30th anniversary of the Liberation War's end in 1988, invited by the Filomena Pinheiro government. At the anniversary, she performed her war songs in public for the last time.
Capitalising on the renewed attention, she released the retrospective box set The Woman Who Won The War in 1989. Compiled with the assistance of Radix magazine, it collected the best 1938–1958 live performances of her songs, digitally remastered. The set was critically acclaimed and one of her best-distributed releases in years.
She began collecting her old photographs and overseeing digital remasters of her films, describing it as a conservation effort for her great contribution to Gylian pop culture. She described Gilda and her musical comedies with Ellen Powell as "the greatest jewels of my life", but found the experience of supervising the latter's restoration bittersweet due to Ellen's death years before.
Reda's health began to decline in the 1980s. She sometimes had trouble remembering lines and would begin to ramble in conversation with friends. She was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in early 1983. She publicly announced her diagnosis and talked frankly about it, helping draw attention to a previously obscure disease.
She took up painting to cope with Alzheimer's, and strove to remain intellectually active after her diagnosis, continuing her musical and film work. She donated prolifically to medical research. She was particularly animated by the desire to live long enough to see her films remastered. "My life is reaching its end, so I would like all the acclaim and accolades and tributes to happen now, so I can relish them and die the most self-satisfied woman in Gylias," she quipped in one of her last interviews.
Death
Feeling that her disease was progressing and unwilling to experience a loss of mental faculties, Reda chose to undergo voluntary euthanasia. Having spent her last year putting her affairs in order and saying goodbye to friends and loved ones, Reda was euthanised at a Velouria clinic on 9 January 1991, aged 72.
She chose to orally consume a lethal dose of secobarbital, so as to symbolically triumph over her disease. Her last statement before taking the dose was that she wanted her last words to be, "I am, thank the gods, a Gylian." Her husband and daughter, who were present at her euthanasia, reported that she died peacefully and smiling, looking as if "she'd just gone to sleep".
She was given a public funeral by President Sáe Nyran, and cremated in accordance with her last wishes. Her ashes were scattered in the Salxar mountains near Arlyka.
Legacy
Reda remains one of the most famous figures of the Liberation War and Free Territories culture, and her wartime songs have gained modern appreciation for their lyrical quality, seen as capturing the defiant and rebellious spirit of the Free Territories. Her contribution to soldiers' morale was honoured by the Veterans for a Just Peace and other post-war figures, including defense minister Ann Harman and Prime Minister Filomena Pinheiro.
Her movies with Ellen Powell are considered among the pinnacle of Gylian musical comedies. Haruka Morishima cited their soundtrack style as an inspiration specifically for the Beaties' "Honey Pie".
Although she lost most of her musical audience due to the "rock revolution", Reda remained familiar to subsequent generations for her on-screen work. Her public image as a glamorous and mischievous seductress made her a sex symbol and influenced many, including Rauna Næsve and The Case of the Facts's lead character advocate Mitsuki, for whom Esua Nadel specifically drew on Reda's later image as an impeccably-dressed, perverted rake, as well as Cécile Sorel.
Her on-screen exuberance and comedic skills have been praised and cited by many Gylian comedians, ranging from Teresa Ganzel to Chikageki.
Reda's presidential term cemented her outsized impact on Gylian pop culture. She established the office as a prestigious part of Gylian politics, and was a leading promoter of sautonism, setting an example that influenced Gylian styles. In the words of Esua Nadel, she fulfilled her duties "as if Gilda had been elected President", and her exuberant yet mischievous personality proved excellently suited to the role.
She was fondly regarded by younger generations as an exemplary sympathetic adult figure, putting forward her views on appearance standards without judging or insulting others, and comfortable with aging and poking fun at her "old-fashioned" nature. One of her obituaries described her as a "sometimes fussy, always lovable kooky aunt for the nation".
Private life
Reda called herself bisexual. Throughout her career, she had a string of relationships and one-night stands, which stabilised in later life as her hétaïre work led her to provide companionship to long-term paying clients. Her notable partners included poet Phaedra Metaxa, writer Anaïs Nin, and her co-star Ellen Powell.
She married Gauchic artist Lucien Couturier in 1958, when she was 40 and he was 27. The marriage lasted until her death. They were devoted to each other and had a close relationship, to the point that acquaintances described them as "best friends who happen to fuck".
She had one daughter, Panorea Kazansides (b. 1949), better known as "Penny". The two were very close in life: Penny followed Reda's career path in entertainment, was one of her main assistants during her presidential term, arranged for her care in her last years, and was present with Lucien at her deathbed.
Penny wrote her mother's biography, published in 1993, contributed home movies of Reda to a documentary about art therapy and Nation Building, and helped bring her works to Proton. Her work as the executor of Reda's estate led to a friendship with Kizette Łempicka.
Reda grew up exposed to traditional Hellene religion through her parents, and was nominally a practitioner. Penny wrote in her biography:
"Mother didn't seem to have much truck with belief. She knew how to do rituals, she always talked with 'by the gods' or 'thank the gods', but I never noticed her displaying a sense of wonder or reverence. Most often she was just content. She once gave me a stern talking-to that I respect the gods, but that was it. I obeyed, she was pleased, and it never came up again.
One thing I found interesting is that she rarely seemed to mention the twelve Olympians by name. Every other sentence, there was a 'by the gods', 'thank the gods', 'praise the gods' — whether she was celebrating something, surprised at something, or expressing her frustration. I concluded that 'the gods' were just part of her language — her term for whatever she felt was greater than our reality, whatever had existed since time immemorial. It would've betrayed her Hellene blood if she'd dared not pluralise it."