At the very beginning of The Vagina Monologues, Eve Ensler (2015) sits down on a chair and starts counting the fifty different names attributed to vagina in different cultures. In the fourth section, "Reclaiming Cunt", Ensler happily repeats the word "cunt" time and again with different voice volumes, pitches and dialects. There seems no offense regarding Ensler’s scenes, and the American audience react happily with the monologues. In contrast, in Morocco and Egypt, just naming the female sex organ is a taboo. Zitan and Shabayek face many problems during the production and the performance of the show. The first difficulty is to Arabicise the title – a problem with the word vagina that Ensler herself could not deny. "Doesn’t matter how many times you say it, it never sounds like a word you want to say" (Ensler 2000, 2). Thus, Zitan and Shabayek try to be politically correct regarding using this word. Zitan adapts the title, The Vagina Monologues into Dialy, which means "my own" in colloquial Moroccan Arabic. It was not easy for the actresses themselves to utter such a word. In an interview with Farida Boazawi, one of the three actresses of the Dialy show, she said that she had to repeat the word to herself several times everywhere to get comfortable using it, in the street, at home, while washing dishes and everywhere else in order to utter it naturally without any difficulties (France 24, 2012, translation mine). By the same token, Shabayek has to select a proper title. She entitled her version as Bussy Monologues. The choice of the name, Bussy, is a wordplay of "pussy" to escape censorship. Bussy is an imperative form of the verb "look" or "pay attention" addressed to a female in colloquial Arabic.
This is as far as the title word "vagina" is concerned, but what about the language of the whole text? How can Zitan and Shabayek preserve minimum of respectability while tackling such issues on the stage? The answer is code switching. It is an effective means of counter-censorship. Zitan uses vernacular and colloquial Arabic besides French to break the psycholinguistic level. Besides, "in Dialy, the rare moments that allude to love and tenderness are in French and used ironically to contrast Western views with the violence that is paramount in relationships between men and women in Morocco" (Hachad 2019, 207). By the same token, Bussy is performed in classical Arabic, col loquial Arabic and a mixture of the two, as well as in English. "There is a fantastic language register whereby they try to say whatever they want to say in whichever language, as opposed to resorting to formal speech and doing it comme il faut" (cited in Attalah 2010).