Egypt: An interview and audience with Nawal El Saadawi

Readers might take comfort in this acknowledged vulnerability; it is there in all her writing, indivisible from her passion and righteous anger, but is easily forgotten when in the presence of her tough persona: ‘There she is, standing tall, her shoulders slightly bent, her skin brown like the silt brought down by the Nile, her hair snow white, thick, tossing around her head’, she writes of herself in the opening chapter of Walking through Fire. It is 1993 and the writer has fled her native Cairo, after her name figured on a death list drawn up by a fundamentalist movement. Standing before me, sixteen years later, she seems only slightly more bowed. The author of several works of fiction and non-fiction has agreed to an interview with The Arab in the London Bookshop Housmans, which specialises in ‘books and periodicals of radical interest and progressive politics’. Saadawi is introduced by much of the media in terms such as ‘Egypt’s most controversial feminist author’. Rather than being impressed by Saadawi’s infamy, however, I begin to question what is so radical about her ideas and practices.

Saadawi’s critics malign her with whichever perceived insult is at their disposal: atheist, apostate, mad-woman, man-hater (even a ‘woman against her own sex’ in a book of the same name by Georges Tarabishi). Resilient as she remains in the face of these character assassinations, Saadawi, the medical doctor, psychiatrist and writer, is acutely aware of the limits of suffering that the body and mind can endure. In a chapter of Walking entitled ‘What is suppressed always comes back’ she relates how as a young village doctor she tried to prevent a seventeen year old patient, Masouda, being forcibly returned to her much older husband who had raped her over the course of five years. A village social worker intervenes and orders the girl home, having denounced Saadawi to the authorities for exhibiting ‘a signal disrespect for the moral values and customs of our society’ and for inciting ‘women to rebel against the divine laws of Islam.’ A week later Masouda drowns herself.

There are many forms of cruelty – Saadawi herself talks elsewhere of ‘economic rape’ – but the idea that loyalty to what have come to be known innocuously as spiritual beliefs takes precedence over our responsibility for the health of our bodies and minds is one of the most dangerous ideas prevalent today.

‘There is only one religion and one culture’, she tells the forty or so admirers who have gathered to listen to a talk by the famous author at the bookshop: “It is Capitalist Patriarchy”. Then comes the question from the audience I had been dreading: ‘Doesn’t writing such as yours encourage anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant sentiments’, asks a young woman. Many commentators on the left might be unsettled by this implicit accusation, but not Saadawi: ‘I am against the word, betrayal’, she politely responds. ‘If we write we are not betraying anyone. We lose our ability to criticise because we are afraid of being accused of betrayal.’ The questioner persists, however: ‘Look at the way Muslim women are singled out in France with the headscarf ban.’ ‘Of course we should not criticise only Islam’ Saadawi explains, ‘a movement against Islam alone is political. But you cannot challenge colonialism by wearing the veil; we need to organise with the migrant groups and fight the government.’

All religions or ideologies, even anti-imperialism in some of its permutations, eventually demand blood sacrifices. It is not uncommon for the faces and voices of peers to harden at the mention of women writers who have written unflatteringly about their communities; so fearful are they of betraying an ethnic or religious identity they feel is under attack that they would sacrifice a writer to the vengeful critics who denounce her as a traitor. Misunderstanding or losing sight of the nature of the cause they are fighting for, good people become entangled in the ugly politics of identity.

Reading Walking through Fire, it seems clear that Saadawi is herself loyal to one idea – that the individual must acquire real knowledge about every part of his or her life and body, and that this is higher than any ethnic, religious or gender identity and political affiliation, because the only thing that unites us is that we are human beings:

We are brought up in a very distorted way, mentally and physically; they not only cut our genitals, society circumcises our brains by religion, by science and politics so that we lose our ability to be creative and to have a broad vision of our self and the world…. In all my books it is very clear that I am a medical doctor – I speak about physical diseases, but I also speak about economics, religion, history, anthropology and politics; I’m also a psychiatrist and I speak about mental illness. We receive a very fragmented knowledge in which the physical and mental are separated – this is also a religious idea, but the split between the physical and mental is unnatural. When I write, I write with my body and mind.

It is this sensitivity to our physical as well as our mental vulnerability that compels Saadawi to write and to criticise in the face of denunciations by colleagues, sanctions by the government and death threats from Islamists. In the penultimate chapter of Walking, ‘An aborted revolution’, the author relates how in the summer of 1968, after Egypt had been defeated by Israel in the 1967 war, she decided to be part of a volunteer medical team sent to the Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan. Once there, she moved around in an ambulance car helping pick up the wounded. One night the ambulance rescued a badly wounded guerrilla fighter. Three months later Saadawi sees him moving around in a wheelchair: “He had lost both legs and one arm, was just a trunk.’ On her last night in the camp, the young Saadawi comes across the fighter, Ghassan, lying in his wheelchair outside his tent. He is dying and speaks candidly to ‘Dr Nawal’ of his desires, displaying an acute awareness of how society treats the powerless:

“All those bodies lying in the tents were young poor boys like me. They owned nothing except their bodies. In fact they did not even possess their bodies. Their bodies were owned by the leaders and their leaders stink…. The leadership decided one day to open a file on me. I was now considered a handicapped veteran, or a beggar – I don’t know which, since I had to pick up what others threw away to feed myself. If an important personality came to visit our leader, they would round up people like me and put them together in one place, sweep everything clean, hoist flags and banners everywhere. Instead of being the pride of our nation… I became a source of shame, a spot on our reputation that had to be concealed, hidden away.”

Ghassan punctuates his story with a curiously direct address to his female listener: ‘The first insulting word you heard in your life was mara wasn’t it? ... My enemies cut my body to pieces but for me it was less painful than this insult.’ Mara means ‘woman’ in colloquial Arabic, but unlike the classical mara’a it is used in a derogatory sense, a woman being considered almost worthless and a burden on society.

Physical wounds are meticulously observed and recorded, as are the varied manifestations of mental torment; Saadawi’s narrative absolves few and carries explicit accusations against many – the powerful, and those whose ignorance and obsequiousness make them complicit in the suffering of vulnerable members of their society. In her medical report on Masouda, Saadawi writes that her young patient had sustained severe anal injuries as a result of having been raped nightly by a grown man. She adds that, ‘The girl found no other way of escape except through mental disease.’

I ask Saadawi how she can ever forgive people such as the men in the case of Masouda, who cited divine laws as justification for returning the victim to her aggressor. ‘My anger is always channelled into creative writing – I am not an angry person’ she replies:

I am a very happy, smiling person; many people when they meet me are astonished because they expect to find an angry, violent feminist! But all my anger goes into my work, and that is very important because many women are afraid to show their anger. Some women direct their anger towards themselves, developing depression or neurosis. Anger is a very positive emotion, even animals get angry if they’re beaten, so healthy human beings are angry when they are beaten, when they are exposed to oppression and injustice. The point is how they use the anger – against themselves? Do they kill their husbands instead of divorcing them? Why should I kill my husband? I divorce him and then I reclaim my life! I am against killing, unless you kill like Firdaus in [her novel] Woman at Point Zero, defending your life.

‘My writing is a protest against God, religion, and against spirituality, which does not liberate women but only adds to their oppression.’ Saadawi recalls that as a child at school in Egypt in the 1930s and ‘40s, she had two best friends – a Jewish and a Christian girl. The teacher separated them for religious education classes and each was told to study their own holy book, while she was warned not to touch the ‘unclean’ food of the other; Saadawi recalls being upset, unable to understand why they were kept apart. In adulthood the author says she spent ten years studying the texts of all the major religions: ‘These holy books are full of contradictions, full of racism, hatred of the other, and the idea of evil, of killing each other.’

We receive a bad education at school and university – we become good scholars, but we are ignorant of the world; it is important to undo what education did to us.

Saadawi urges us to make the connection: between politics, class, religion, sexual violence and the economic dependency of women; between laws that legalise rape and neo-colonial wars; between patriarchy, monogamy, the name of the father, and female genital mutilation. For her last novel she used the name of her mother, Zaynab, and Arabic publishers were too afraid to publish it: ‘We have lost our common sense’ the author says with sadness."

May 2009

By Eleanor Kilroy

Source: The Arab magazine