A life in writing
Walking through Fire: A Life of Nawal El-Saadawi, Nawal El-Saadawi, Trans. Sherif Hetata, Cape Town: David Philip & London and New York: Zed Books, 2002. pp251
In this, the second part of her memoirs, Egyptian novelist and activist Nawal El-Saadawi continues the narrative of her life begun in A Daughter of Isis.
The book opens in the 1990s with Saadawi teaching at Duke University in North Carolina and explaining the circumstances that led her and her husband, Sherif Hetata, to choose voluntary exile in the United States. A "death list" put out by militant Islamists included Saadawi's name, and the Egyptian authorities, fearing for Saadawi's life, gave her 24-hour security protection. Saadawi, however, forever distrusting the authorities, resented their constant presence in her life and felt threatened by it. Despite her anti-imperialist stance, she went to the United States, and she does not seem to have had much reluctance in doing so. At Duke, her memories take her back to her own undergraduate days at Cairo University's Faculty of Medicine at Qasr Al-Aini in the early 1950s, and these memories form the basis of the narrative.
Like many memoir writers of her generation, Saadawi links the story of her life with that of the nation. Indeed, national concerns, sentiments, and, inevitably, disappointments, make up much of the book. Students at Qasr Al-Aini joined different political factions: communist, Wafdist or Muslim Brotherhood, with some of them, such as Saadawi's female colleagues, not obviously caring about politics. While the author describes herself as having attended student rallies, even speaking on occasion, she does not describe her politics at the time. The impression we get is one of simple-hearted patriotism and support for the struggle for independence from Britain.
Saadawi's relationship with one of the freedom fighters in the Suez Canal Zone, Ahmed Helmi, ends in marriage, a daughter and a divorce. But the relationship also leaves her with a political lesson: those who fight for what they believe in are often not only later forgotten but also turned against and branded as criminals. The experience of the freedom fighters in the Canal Zone would be repeated after the 1952 Revolution, Saadawi says. Helmi's experience in the Canal Zone shattered him, and he returned a changed man, having lost his faith in everything. The growing rift between the young couple eventually led to their divorce in 1956.
Saadawi is reticent about her own reactions towards the 1952 Revolution. She describes the joy experienced at its outbreak, and describes Gamal Abdel-Nasser in enchanted, if slightly clichéd, terms: "His skin was brown, the colour of fresh silt brought down by the Nile." But she is quick to discern -- or is it a realisation in retrospect? -- signs of intolerance on the part of the revolutionary officers.
Following her graduation, Saadawi fights to gain an appointment in a health centre in the village of Kafr Tahla, the authorities being reluctant at that time to appoint women doctors to the countryside. There, with a baby in her arms (her daughter Mona born in 1956), she begins an almost idyllic experience of work and life. Saadawi arrives in the village an educated, modern woman, hoping to bring enlightenment to the rural population. This causes problems, and surprisingly, even writing half a century after the events, Saadawi does not question her own attitudes. The hostility of village notables and of the local landowner, whom Saadawi snubs, prompts the authorities to relocate her to Cairo. Reading this account, we are invited to form the impression of patriarchal interests conspiring against a good modern doctor.
Throughout the narrative, Saadawi's concern for women's rights and her consciousness of herself as a woman come through most strongly. As with other feminists of her generation, the quest for national liberation is tied to a quest for individual freedoms. Saadawi's first marriage having ended at the young age of 25 she encounters society's bias against female divorcees. A divorced woman is sometimes portrayed as "second hand" -- an attitude reflected by male writers whom Saadawi takes issue with, such as Abdel-Halim Abdullah, Youssef El-Sebaie and Naguib Mahfouz.
Perhaps it was the stigma of being a divorcee that drove Saadawi to marry a second time, this time without love, to a lawyer. She has sharply negative recollections of the experience: this second husband did not share her intellectual and literary pursuits, and he thought little of her writing and discouraged it. This marriage also ended in divorce, but not before it had affirmed Saadawi's sense of her own identity and her need for independence.
The chapter detailing Saadawi's mother's suffering from breast cancer and her eventual death from the disease is one of the most poignant in the book. As might have been expected, Saadawi enjoyed a complex relationship with her mother, though there are also parts of the narrative from which her mother is conspicuous only by her absence, perhaps indicating some resentment. (Saadawi's eight siblings hardly appear either.) But in the chapter dealing with her mother's illness and death, the umbilical bond between mother and daughter comes through strongly, and one feels that it was particularly courageous of Saadawi to face her own emotions and to write about them as her mother lay dying.
Though Saadawi felt that she was treated differently by her parents as a girl, she was allowed considerable freedom as a middle-class woman. She was able to continue her education and to go to medical school, and then she was able to marry and divorce the man she loved and insist on taking a job in the countryside. She often portrays her father as an enlightened man, but, one feels, resentments remain. For example, of her father's death Saadawi writes: "When my father died I did not weep. Deep down inside I did not feel sadness, but something else that was more a mysterious happiness, like a prisoner who has been told that he will be set free as soon as the morning bell rings."
Later, though, she writes of her dead father's continuing presence in her life, appearing often in her dreams: "The face of my dead father is so close that I can almost touch it with my fingertips, yet it is more than forty years since I last saw him [...] It is as though he never went away, has always been with us [...] Perhaps my love for my father was the greatest love in my life, surpassed only by the love I had for my mother."
Saadawi went on to lead a life full of confrontations with the powers that be, confrontations that eventually landed her in prison in 1981 during the wave of arrests ordered by late President Anwar Sadat before his assassination in October the same year. Yet Saadawi is surprisingly reticent about her political activities, though she does not spare the Egyptian authorities, even when these had offered her protection from Islamist death threats: "In the past [the authorities] had dealt me one blow after another, had continued to hunt me down in every activity I undertook. Just a few months earlier, they had decided to close down the Arab Women's Solidarity Association I had founded ten years before, and to ban the magazine Noon that we had been publishing for almost two years. How could a government that had fought me so persistently seek to protect my life?"
In 1964, Saadawi married her third husband, Sherif Hetata, a medical doctor, political activist and novelist. It is a marriage that has lasted through turbulent times, and in Saadawi's recollection of the 1960s and beyond, Sherif Hetata's influence is clearly discernible. Throughout, the struggle to write has been an essential part of Saadawi's quest for both individual and national freedom. She has been faced with the "menace" of the blank page and with panic when she fails to write. At other times, she has been denied the right to write. The appreciation of each other's writing clearly has kept Saadawi and Hetata together. They have a son, Atef, an aspiring filmmaker, and Saadawi's memoir ends with her return to Cairo in December 1996.
A final note on the English text of this book would not be out of place. While the translation by Sherif Hetata indicates close collaboration on Saadawi's part, the English text retaining much of the whimsical, almost naïve tone of her writing, it often comes across as strange and alienating, even for a reader from the same cultural traditions. There are too many footnotes that serve only to distance the reader, giving the text a misplaced scholarly feel.
There is no need to add a footnote to explain that Umm Kulthoum is a famous Egyptian singer, for example, and no need, either, to explain that Al-Shaab means "The People", or that Kafr Tahla is the author's village, when such information could be incorporated in the text. The decision to translate the title 'Amm, often used as a form of respect, as "Uncle" seems ridiculous when talking about "Uncle Mohamed", the undertaker. Translating Egyptian ululations, zagharid, as "yooyoos" sounds equally bizarre.
Other footnotes are simply wrong: Al-Sayeda Zeinab, whose shrine has become the locus of the anti-war movement this year and who has a special place in Egyptian affections, is not "one of the Prophet's wives". Zeinab was the grand- daughter of Prophet Mohamed, daughter of Ali Ibn Abi Taleb and Fatma Al-Zahraa, the Prophet's daughter. She was named after her deceased maternal aunt, Zeinab. She is the female saint of Shi'ism, sister of Al-Hassan and Al-Hussein, and she played an important role during the tragic battle of Karbala.
The cover bears a photograph of Saadawi looking astonished or perplexed. It is as if having "walked through fire", as she puts it, the author cannot quite believe she has made it this far. Like many memoir writers, Saadawi here attempts to do more than give her life story. Rather, she has tried to give an account of contemporary Egypt -- a history of Egypt through the eyes of Nawal El-Saadawi. And this is where both the book's strengths and its weaknesses lie.
C a p t i o n :
Nawal El-Saadawi
Al-Ahram Weekly Online : 20 - 26 February 2003 (Issue No. 626)
Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/626/bo4.htm