The Essential Nawal El Saadawi

A Reader

Nawal El Saadawi, Doctor Adele Newson-Horst

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781848139022
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

The writings of Nawal El Saadawi are essential to anyone wishing to understand the contemporary Arab world. Her dissident voice has stayed as consistent in its critique of neo.imperialist international politics as it has in its denunciation of women's oppression, both in her native Egypt and in the wider world. Saadawi is a figure of international significance, and her work has a central place in Arabic history and culture of the last half century. Featuring work never before translated into English, The Essential Nawal El Saadawi gathers together a wide range of Saadawi's writing. From novellas and short stories to essays on politics, culture, religion and sex; from extensive interviews to her work as a dramatist; from poetry to autobiography, this book is essential for anyone wishing to gain a sense of the breadth of Saadawi's work.

PART ONE

Articles, Essays and Nonfictional Prose

1

How to Write and Why

IT WAS MY MOTHER, Zaynab, who taught me how to speak, then how to put words on paper or how to write. The first word I uttered was Mama, my mother. The first word I put on paper was Nawal, my name. When I went to school the teacher asked me to write my name on my notebook. I wrote the word Nawal. The teacher said I should write my full name, not just my first name. So I wrote Nawal Zaynab. The teacher was angry; he erased my mother’s name and ordered me to write my last name, El Saadawi. El Saadawi was a foreign name to me, the name of a grandfather who died before I was born.

I never liked the name El Saadawi; it was like a foreign body attached to me, but I had to write it all the time, on all my papers and books, until I was known as El Saadawi by everybody who knows me. However, deep inside me I never felt it was me or my real name.

From childhood I kept a secret diary on which I wrote my real name: Nawal Zaynab. I felt a strong urge to write. I wanted to erase the false name imposed on me. Writing is a human cultural activity to express the hidden truth, the hidden true self, the hidden language. Speaking and writing are similar and different. Both help self-expression and communication with others, but speaking is more ancient than writing. Speech is a human instinct wired into our brains by many thousands of years of evolutionary selection. But writing is a recent cultural acquisition. Oral language evolved more than 100,000 years ago. Writing evolved less than 6,000 years ago.

Writing slows us down, makes us think, rethink, contemplate, connect different disconnected ideas. While we write we are not silent. We read silently what we write. An orator moves us more viscerally than our own silent reading. The music of speech is drained out of silent reading. While I write I add my imaginary inflections to the text. Reading silently is a relatively recent invention. Writing is a second language to be learned. It can be a visual language, a sign language.

Most often ideas come to me when I am alone, in complete silence. I hear ideas in my head moving. I love being alone to grasp my inner voice. This tendency has caused me trouble with people around me. My second husband became suspicious if I left our bed to be alone. When he saw me writing he wanted to read what I wrote. I had to hide my writing in a secret place. He thought I was in love with another man. I tried to convince him that I was writing fiction but he could not understand. At last he came to me and said, ‘Me or your writing, you have to choose.’

I chose my writing and left him. The pleasure of writing to me is more than sexual pleasure, more than any pleasure. Writing is essential to my life, like breathing. I can live without a husband but I cannot live without writing. By writing I become one with the world and with myself. Writing is a physical and mental activity. Languages end up in the left hemisphere of the brain. In most people the left hemisphere is specialized for rapid sequence recognition, which it does better than the right hemisphere. Both coordinate creative thinking. In music perception the left hemisphere is better than the right hemisphere at recognizing rhythm, whereas the right hemisphere is better at recognizing melody.

Everywhere I go journalists ask me this question: ‘How can you write fiction when you are a medical doctor?’ Studying medicine helped me to write better fiction. To my mind, facts and fiction are inseparable, like body and mind. Through creative writing we undo the false opposition between emotion and reason, between the irrational and rational, between the scientific and the literary or fictional. I write fiction to tell the truth. We grasp reality better through the imagination. To write we have to depend on technology, from the Gutenberg Press to the Internet. Creative writing of fiction and nonfiction has allowed us to achieve things our brain cells can hardly comprehend. I write to emerge from the dark to the light of knowledge, from the chaos of the unjust world to a new world of justice, freedom and love. I write to challenge the superpowers on earth and in heaven. Both are living on war, exploitation and deception. Both discriminate between people according to race, gender, class, religion and other traits. I write to change myself and the world for the better.

February 2009

2

How to Fight against the Postmodern Slave System

About my dreams

FROM MY DEEP SLEEP I was awakened by a terrible sound, like a sudden explosion coming from under my pillow. It was the television of my neighbour who cannot live without it. A very thin wall separates her television from my bed. I have slept since childhood embracing my pillow, pressing it to my head or my chest — a habit inherited from my mother or grandmother. In fact, I can sleep without a husband but I cannot sleep without a pillow. It may be due to an inherited gene (not just a habit) because it runs in my maternal family. This gene has evolved perhaps through a biological revolution against the patriarchal, feudal, racist values embedded in divine books since slavery. I think this gene is more sophisticated, more aware of social injustice, than previous undeveloped genes that I think revolted only against sexual deprivation.

I opened my eyes to a horrible feeling that something had exploded in my brain — a living cell, a pulsing artery, a malignant tumour. It was 7 a.m. on Thursday, 11 September 2008, seven years after what they call 9/11 in the USA. Since I came to the USA, I have never stopped worrying about my physical and mental health or dying by a terrorist bomb. In Egypt, under the local oppressive religious regime, I suffered political, social and economic pressures and oppressions, but I did not worry about my health. In fact I felt very healthy, full of energy to fight back. Since I came to the USA I have been bombarded day and night with frightening words of terror and images about breast cancer, life or death insurance, heart attacks, blood clotting or thrombosis, angina pectoris, Alzheimer’s, psychosis, neurosis, depression and other mental illnesses. I hate sickness, doctors and the smell of hospitals. I became a medical doctor just to please my father before he died during the 1950s. I think that most working creative people live healthy and die healthy. My illiterate peasant grandmother, who worked in her field under the sun, lived and died healthy. She never went to a doctor. She was an energetic happy woman struggling with the men and women in her village against the oppressive mayor, King Farouk and British colonizers. I still remember her jokes against the mayor and her ringing laugh. She was a creative agricultural worker and a clever storyteller with a wide imagination. I think that creativity brings happiness, and happiness brings physical and mental health. When I am absorbed writing a novel I feel healthy and happy. I never feel sick when I am struggling with others against the global or local oppressive powers.

I stretched my hand and switched on the electric light. I discovered that my head and chest were not bleeding. I could walk to the living room. I could even open the fridge and drink water. I felt happy, being alive again after temporary death. I started thinking about my future plans, what I want to do from now until I die in a terrorist attack or from breast cancer. I may live another ten or even twenty years. Yesterday while walking in the park I met a woman walking fast. She smiled at me. We started talking. She looked my age but she was over ninety, twenty years older than me. I felt refreshed. I will live at least twenty more years.

Of course I will continue to write fiction and nonfiction. But I have a new dream, to make films, or at least one film based on one of my novels. I have already written the scenario; in fact I have written two, but they are the prisoners of my computer. I have no access to this formidable world called cinema or moving pictures.

Another dream is pending in my head: to establish a place or an institute for creative dissident men and women, where they are able to find the freedom and energy to do their work. This place or institute will be like a haven for those people in need of a place to work and develop their creativity within a supportive group or community, for those who are forced to leave their native homes because of their creativity and free thoughts.

Under this postmodern, capitalist, religious, military system more and more creative women and men are forced to live in exile. Exile can be outside your country or within your native home. I experienced both types of exile. Here in the USA I have to carry the title Alien Non-resident. It is more oppressive than all names given to me by my oppressive regime in Egypt.

The increasing power of the capitalist military system is accompanied by the increasing power of religious fundamentalist political groups. Today, religion plays an increasing role in politics all over the world. The capitalist, patriarchal, postmodern false democracy, based on the false free market, needs God to justify its injustices, to cover up the increasing dictatorship, the growing gap between the rich and the poor, between men and women, and between the socalled First and Third World; to conceal its military economic and political wars with a sacred mission, to disguise its state terrorism under cover of a loving benevolent merciful God. But His Majesty is also cruel and violent with the Devils who do not obey and submit to Him. He is thirsty for blood, loving disasters, destroying nations that are at variance with His Prophet or Messenger, instilling fear of the Others, the infidels, those who do not believe in His holy books, instilling hate, resentment, racism, sexism, deception, contradictions, double standards, war and hypocrisy. All these unethical, inhuman values are to be found in the three divine books of monotheism and other religious books.

Why are more people going back to religion?

Many people are deceived by the media and the political–religious educational systems sponsored by the state. The state in any country cannot survive without controlling and veiling people’s minds with the fear of God. ‘God-fearing’ is the highest ethical description of good citizens globally and locally, in the West and in the East. Churches and cathedrals are the most glorious holy buildings in Christian countries, no less than mosques in Islamic countries. Even in the so-called secular countries the separation between state and religion never really happened, even in Europe, which is relatively more secular than the USA. Fanatical religious political leaders became stars in the so-called free democratic elections and in the big media all over the world. Religion is a political ideology; you cannot distinguish between politics, religion, economics, ethics, morality, sexuality, culture, history, science, art, body, mind and spirit.

Some sophisticated postmodern men and women are not religious (they do not believe in divine books or even the existence of a God), but they refer to what they call spirituality. They believe in the split between the body and the spirit, which is the core of religion. They are not aware of the paradox, nor do they want to be aware of it. They enjoy their hunger for both spiritual and material gratification. They believe in human ethics and social justice but they support the war in Iraq, in Palestine and in other parts of the world. They believe in equality between the sexes or even classes but they support unequal global trade and the capitalist free market.

Some less sophisticated people need their God to cure their incurable diseases, or postpone their death, or forgive their sins, or save them from disasters, or fight with them in their wars, like G.W. Bush and other heads of big states or superpowers. Most people believe in the Bible or the Qur’an or their chosen divine book without ever reading them. They defend the Book of God without knowing it, or studying it, or discovering its contradictions, biases and defects.

The fanatical religious groups in Egypt who have had my name on a death list since 1988 following the publication of my novel The Fall of the Imam have never read this book or any of my books. They tell the media: ‘We do not read heretical books.’ How do they know a book is heretical without reading it? This is the same as worshipping a divine book without reading it. Blind faith leads to blind fundamentalism, blind fanaticism, blind racism, blind sexism, blind hate and blind love. The person who killed the writer Farag Foda in Cairo on 8 June 1992 was a poor illiterate fisherman who had never read a book written by the author he killed. Religious crimes or so-called honour crimes are political, economic, cultural, social, moral and historical crimes. Like religious wars, they hide behind the invisible God to rob, colonize, loot, plunder, rape, exploit and satisfy their greed and insatiable physical and material appetites. Jewish fundamentalism, Islamic fundamentalism, Christian fundamentalism and other religions are spreading widely during this 21st-century postmodern era for inhuman political-economic reasons and not for moral or ethical or human reasons.

Barack Obama, during his presidential campaign in the summer of 2008, praised and supported the state of Israel. To gain votes and funds he ignored the fact that the state of Israel was established by military violence, killing and displacing a whole nation, the Palestinian nation. G.W. Bush in the USA and his Republican Party are part of the Judeo-Christian fundamentalist powers that play a major role in US politics today. The Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin told ministry students, during the summer of 2008, at her former evangelical church, that the USA sent troops to Iraq on a mission from God. She used her God to justify killings in Iraq and to cover up her neocolonial economic oil war with spiritual slogans. She asked the students to pray for a plan to build a $30 billion natural gas pipeline in her state, Alaska, calling it God’s will. Sarah Palin said she would work to implement God’s will from the governor’s office, but that she could not do anything if the hearts of the Alaskan people are not with God. A few women and men opposed her and said that the job of the president is to unify American people around policy goals and not divide them by religion. But those genuine voices were ignored by the big US media funded by capitalist money. Many ordinary people in the USA do not believe in the capitalist, terrorist God of Sarah Palin and Republicans. They are fed up with the deception of Judeo-Christian fundamentalist increasing powers in the USA but they are silent. They constitute the silent majority; they have common sense but they do not have access to the media or political-economic power.

Where is the American feminist movement?

I wonder, where is the feminist movement which had an effective voice in the USA during the 1960s and 1970s? Why are women disconnected, disillusioned, depoliticized, not only in the USA but all over the world, as has happened to the socialist and other progressive movements everywhere?

US media and cultural life are full of reli...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Editor
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About Nawal El Saadawi
• Timeline
• Preface
• Introduction: The World of Nawal El Saadawi or Nawal Zaynab (the name she would prefer to take)
• Part One: Articles, Essays and Nonfictional Prose
• Part Two: Fiction and Poetry
• Part Three: Drama
• Part Four: Interviews
• Bibliography
• Index