Nawal El Saadawi
Egyptian Writer
1931-
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An Egyptian psychiatrist, feminist, novelist, and author of nonfiction, Nawal El Saadawi has been described as "the Simone de Beauvoir of the Arab world, " according to reviewer Robin Morgan in Ms. El Saadawi is an advocate of values that threaten the patriarchal Arab society, and her outspoken support of political and sexual rights for women has resulted in her arrest on more than one occasion. After the publication of her book Women and Sex in 1971 El Saadawi found herself dismissed from her positions as director of health education in Egypt's Ministry of Health and as editor-in-chief of Health magazine. On September 6, 1981, she was arrested under Egypt's "Law for the Protection of Values from Shame" and imprisoned during the politically volatile administration of Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat. El Saadawi's arrest attracted publicity as women throughout the Arab world, Europe, the United States, and Asia campaigned for her freedom, finally securing her release on November 25, 1981. Although her books are no longer censored in her homeland, they were banned in Egypt and other Arab countries for a time, although many managed to find their way into most Arab nations.
El Saadawi's work has been translated into many languages, including Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Portuguese, Swedish, Urdu, and Persian;
The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World was her first publication available in English. The book considers the role of women in world history, Arab history and literature, and contemporary Egypt, beginning with a section titled "The Mutilated Half." This portion is "the longest and by far the most powerful, " in the opinion of New York Times Book Review contributor Vivian Gornick. In it, El Saadawi contends that "strongly patriarchal relations in Arab society, coupled with its hierarchical class nature, have subjected women to a great deal of discrimination and caused them to be victims of a very marked degree of suppression, both physical and mental." One manifestation of this suppression is female circumcision--amputation of the clitoris--a procedure routinely performed when El Saadawi was a child and one which, El Saadawi states, is still performed regularly in Egyptian villages, though its practice is declining in more urban areas.
The Hidden Face of Eve opens with El Saadawi's recollection of how, at the age of six, she was taken from her bed one night and into the bathroom, where her clitoris was amputated without anesthetic. Moments later, her sister was also circumcised, and El Saadawi recalls exchanging a look with her sister that seemed to say: "'Now we know what it is. Now we know where lies our tragedy. We were born of a special sex, the female sex. We are destined in advance to taste of misery, and to have a part of our body torn away by cold, unfeeling cruel hands.'" Throughout her later career as a physician El Saadawi discovered that the memory of that experience haunted not only her but most circumcised women in the Arab world. Children were often brought bleeding into her clinic while others died because of the inhumane way the operation was performed. Still others were subject to acute or chronic infections, and many suffered devastating psychological effects.
Consequently, in her struggle to gain equal rights for women, El Saadawi has made efforts to educate people about the harmful medical and psychological effects of clitoridectomies. Medically, such operations serve no purpose. They are simply, according to an excerpt from The Hidden Face of Eve appearing in Ms., "one of the measures by which the patriarchy reinforces the values of monogamy. Not long ago, in some parts of Egypt, a woman could be killed if she was not a virgin on her wedding night and a wife could be killed if she was unfaithful to her husband. Because the woman has a powerful sexuality, the male-class society must enforce monogamy with powerful measures--physically, psychologically, morally, and legally." Morgan found the book "a powerful, passionate work--a cry of pain and rage, " and was impressed at El Saadawi's "brilliant capacity to make the connections: between Freud's 'psychic clitoridectomy' of European and American women and the physical clitoridectomy in some Arab countries." Gornick suggested that "for an American feminist, it is a curious work. Written by a Marxist who has read Freud, in a country and for a people that require an educated introduction to the idea of equality for women, the book seems disoriented by the inorganic nature of its understanding. On the one hand it reads like a 19th-century tract; on the other hand, its appeal to reason is drawn from references so sophisticated as to make the condition described sound even more surreal than it usually does."
Some of El Saadawi's fictional works, which draw from her reality as a woman in a patriarchy, have also been translated into English. The Circling Song, written in 1973 but not published in English until 1989, "describes a culture in which female rites of passage include rape and clitoridectomy, and the prevailing political regime relegates women to positions of servility and teaches them to react with shame, " declared Sue Roe in the Times Literary Supplement. Miriam Cooke in World Literature Today related, "The Circling Song, which El Saadawi claims as her favorite novel, is a powerful example of the kind of anger and desperation to which Arab women writers are beginning to give vent."
A Woman at Point Zero, based on the true story of a prostitute named Firdaus who was sentenced to the death penalty for killing her pimp, is a "harrowing account of a woman's apparently inevitable passage from incest to murder, as she struggles for independence, selfhood, and love, " Cooke observed. In interpreting the novel, Cooke assessed, "A woman has to play the game of submission or die. [Firdaus] chose death." Similarly, in God Dies by the Nile, a novel about corrupt politicians and the tyranny they exercise over women and the poor, El Saadawi implies that "rebellion, sacrifice, and transcendence, options against oppression, are at the expense of life, " in the opinion of Books and Bookmen contributor Mary Hockaday. Although set in a symbolic Nile village run by a "privileged and manipulative" mayor, according to the New York Times Book Review contributor Bharati Mukherjee, God Dies by the Nile may be read as "a political allegory about Anwar el-Sadat's rule."
Society as well as family exerts control in El Saadawi's Two Women in One, a novel concerning a female medical student who rebels against conformist values, a dangerous act for a woman in her society. Although Christian Science Monitor reviewer Laila Said remarked that the novel presents "a valuable opportunity to understand more clearly the currents of thought regarding women in a culture vastly different from the West, " B. Harlow in Choice determined that it "resonates with the larger issues which confront women throughout the Third World as well as in the West, " namely, both personal and political repression. New York Times Book Review contributor Nikki Keddie concluded that Two Women in One is "less strictly autobiographical and less overtly political" than some of El Saadawi's other works, and that "as a result she suggests a more universal message."
Another of El Saadawi's political yet wide-reaching works is Fall of the Imam, which is set on a fictitious male-dominated island and exposes and satirizes the hypocrisy in politics--particularly theocracies--and the treatment of women in all societies. For instance, the author addresses the double standard that women are to be chaste and men promiscuous, and she weaves a story of "a ruler who bans drink but has a room in his palace for drinking, who prays publicly but who privately frequents brothels, " observed Nicolette Jones in Books. Jones added, "The Fall of the Imam is a study of the psychology of power that goes far beyond slogans." The book provoked death threats from religious extremist groups, causing the government to protect El Saadawi by stationing a twenty-four-hour armed guard detail at her home.
El Saadawi examines her own life in A Daughter of Isis: The Autobiography of Nawal El Saadawi, published in 2000. Focusing on her childhood and adolescence, the author crafts "a poetic coming-of-age memoir, " in the words of Library Journal reviewer Jenny Presnell. She recalls how her brothers were praised and rewarded for their accomplishments, while she was virtually ignored. She relates again the grisly tale of her childhood mutilation, in a style that is "moving" and "brutally frank, " cautions a writer for World Literature in Review. "Her experience of clitorectomy at age six and the similar experiences of other girls at a comparable age are narrated in the most graphic and damning manner."
A Daughter of Isis illustrates that although El Saadawi condemns patriarchy, her own father was a tremendous influence on her in many positive ways. He participated in the 1919 rebellion against the British occupation; he loved to read and was a great thinker. Following in his footsteps carried a high price for El Saadawi, including the loss of her job, imprisonment, and being included on a death list composed by religious fundamentalists. A Daughter of Isis is a "touching memoir, " according to Jennifer Hunt in American Visions, who added: "This account is painful in its reminders, but inspiring in its triumphs." The writer for World Literature in Review commented that the book "is a witness to [El Saadawi's] literary ability, " and concluded: "Besides being the foremost feminist in the Arab world, Nawaal El Saadawi is a great writer in her own right."
In an essay for Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, El Saadawi once wrote of her clashes with the government. "The authorities claimed that I was instigating women toward absolute sexual freedom and immorality, " she remarked, "even though in everything I wrote I tried to combat reducing women to being sex objects fit only for seduction and consumption. I was even opposed to women wearing makeup. I encouraged them to be intelligent human beings and not mere bodies to satisfy men, to produce children, or to be slaves." El Saadawi also noted that even when she was a child, "Deep within me, I resented authority. This was due to my mother's resentment of her father's authority, and also to my father's resentment of the Egyptian government's authority and of the British occupation." The author added that her husband, Sherif Hetata, was jailed for thirteen years "because of his intellectual and political rebellion"; "Imprisonment in my country is always possible for any person who thinks and writes freely. Most of the men and women I know have been in prison at one time in their life."
El Saadawi once told CA: "Writing to me is like breathing. I cannot live without it. Expression of one's self is an essential part of a process of knowing and fighting for liberation." As she explained of her focus on women, "the oppression of women is not characteristic of Arab or Moslem societies or countries of the so-called Third World alone. It constitutes an integral part of the political, economic, and cultural system preponderant in most of the world. It is born of developments in history that made one class rule over another and men dominate over women. It derives its roots from the patriarchal class system that has ruled over human beings ever since slavery started to hold sway. . . . We cannot separate between the oppression of women and the international politics in neocolonialism which increases the gap between nations, classes, [and] sexes.
For more information check out the display in Burling, or visit her page at Literary Resource Center online...
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Hanan Al-Shaykh (1945- )
Etel Adnan (1925- )
Sahar Khalifeh (1941- )
Alifa Rifaat (1930-1996)
