Dissident from Birth

by Stephanie McMillan

Appeared in City Link, October 13, 1999.

When the daya, the midwife of the Egyptian village Kafr Tahla, saw Nawal being born she did not shout the joyful "yoo-yoo" of celebration. She bowed her head in sorrowful preparation of telling the family waiting outside the sad news that it was a girl. The infant herself she dropped into a basin of water, leaving Allah to decide whether to let her live or mercifully for everyone, let her drown.

Nawal el Saadawi writes in her autobiography (Daughter of Isis, Zed Books, 1999) that a Satanic will must have possessed her that day of her birth in 1931, because Satan is the only one strong enough to fly a banner of rebellion in God's face.

El Saadawi has flown that banner of rebellion all her life. At just ten years old her spirit of rebelliousness helped her escape an arranged marriage. Her aunts, preparing her appearance for the marriage market, had ripped the down from her limbs with sticky halawa, singed her frizzy hair into smooth waves, painted her lips red and brushed her teeth with salt to make them gleam. They told her to wear her best dress and gave her a tray of coffee to serve to a serious suitor talking with her father in the living room. On her way from the kitchen she stopped in the hallway where she had hidden an eggplant. She smeared its dark juice all over her teeth to make them look rotten. She wiped the lipstick off on the back of her hand and touseled her hair. She quietly came into the living room, smiled brightly at suitor with her streaked teeth and tripped in front of him, spilling cups of hot coffee and glasses of cold water all over him. He fled. All it cost her was a sound thrashing, a low price indeed for a narrow escape. "What mattered was that my bridegroom had disappeared like a wispy summer cloud in the wind," she writes.

The following day she started a diary, the first step in a lifetime of writing. Today her books number over thirty and include nine novels. They have been translated into at least sixteen languages and are popular throughout the world. She is perhaps best known in the West for her non-fiction work on the lives of women in Arab cultures, The Hidden Face of Eve . Her intense novel about a prostitute jailed for murder, Woman at Point Zero, is also very popular with students and feminists in the United States. Much of what informs el Saadawi's work, in addition to her own life, is her experience as a medical doctor and psychiatrist in Egypt. The trusted position allowed her to learn a lot of intimate details about women's lives, and she was able to compile information that was usually hidden beneath the surface of society, beneath traditions of shame and family honor. Customs involving sexuality were difficult for women to speak about, much less challenge.

El Saadawi's writings, focused on the plight of women in Arab countries, combine intensely personal insights with sharp analysis, and boldly expose the role religion plays in the oppression of women all over the world. "I am critical of all religions," she says firmly, seated at her desk at Florida Atlantic University, where she is a visiting professor in the new Comparative Studies doctoral program. "You see, I criticize Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism. I'm not really threatened by people who say, 'Don't criticize your religion outside your country.' No, I have to criticize everything. I must be honest with myself." In both her novels and non-fiction, she skillfully evokes deep emotion while scathingly attacking the hypocrisy of religious and political leaders.

El Saadawi has had to endure much harassment for her outspokenness. In 1972 she was dismissed from her post as Director of Public Health Education in Egypt's Ministry of Health. She also lost her position as Assistant General Secretary in the Medical Association of Egypt, as well as her job at Health magazine. Noon magazine, for which she served as Editor, was shut down. The international organization Arab Women's Solidarity Association, which she founded and for which she serves as President, was banned in Egypt in 1991 for opposing the Gulf War, and its funds were seized and turned over to a religious women's group. In 1981 el Saadawi was imprisoned at a time when many intellectuals were persecuted by the government of Anwar Sadat. She describes the experience in Memoirs in a Women's Prison. In 1992 her name appeared on a fundamentalist death list, and in the interests of saving her life she decided to accept a teaching position offered by Duke University in North Carolina along with her husband of many years, Sherif Hetata.

Her persecution by the authorities has been a desperate, unsuccessful attempt to lessen her power as a writer. She notices a significant difference between the impact writing can have in her own country compared to in the United States. "Here the system, the establishment is so strong that writers can not change anything. In Egypt, in Africa, you can make revolution by an article. Sadat put me in prison because of one article I wrote. Just one article. It was exposure of the contradictions of his policy and how he was ruining our economy and increasing the gap between the rich and the poor, and how he was encouraging the religious fundamentalist movement. I was writing scientifically, objectively. But this article made him furious and that's why he put me in prison, because this article can change history." Her eyes are direct, almost piercing, and her lilting voice is strong. "In our region poets can go to prison, and writers. A piece of poetry can make a revolution. Because people are waiting for the revolution."

El Saadawi doesn't consider the revolution a future, far-off dream. "You have to start the revolution from here and now. It's a process, and we go on step after step. And we can unite like that. We have to work together and organize, organize all the time, because there is power in unity." She emphasizes the need to organize on both a local and a global level. "We have to go beyond our class, our gender, our nationality, our color, our religion, and then meet. It's important. Without that we can not win. Because our enemy is global, so we must establish a global movement. But global movement doesn't mean I don't do anything locally. I have to start from my base. But to connect the village, the grass roots with the international, that's important. It's happening!" This belief in unity is behind Dr. el Saadawi's travels all over the world speaking and attending conferences, as well as her stints as visiting professor in the United States at Duke, the University of Washington at Seattle, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the current fall semester at Florida Atlantic University. She is teaching a course called "Dissidence and Creativity," though she doesn't think of it as teaching. "I'm not a teacher. You can not teach dissidence, and you can not teach creativity. What I do, usually, I say I undo what education did to them. Because education, and this is a universal phenomenon, it has nothing to do with the West or East, the education system serves the political system, and the military, and the economics. This political power, with its education system, with its religious system, it ruins the creativity of people, and their courage, and their understanding of the self and the other. So what education did, what the media does, what the political system and power do to people, I undo that. And just open the way for the students to discover their own creativity from inside. We are all born creative."

She explains the relationship between creativity and dissidence. "You can not be creative in a system that is very unjust, like the system we live in, unless you are a dissident. Because when you are creative you are for justice, for freedom, for love. You can not accept injustice. You become angry, if this injustice is happening to you or to others. If you are walking in the street and you see children who are begging, who are starving, they are dying of hunger, what do you do? You become furious. You want to change the system that created this hunger. You discover it's not national only, it's international. So I make the connection, I open up to understand the connection between international, national and family oppression. And why we have poverty. It's social, political. It's not a natural disaster. It's made by the political system, internationally and nationally. So if you are creative, you will feel these children who are beggars, you will be angry, and you'll fight to make them eat. So you find yourself active. I do not separate between writing and fighting."

Indeed, el Saadawi's writing and speaking have been very effective weapons in the struggles she has taken up, for example in her campaign against the practice of female circumcision (the excision of the clitoris extensively practiced in Egypt and elsewhere in North Africa as a way to control women through their sexuality), her contribution to the Report on United States War Crimes Against Iraq by former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark and others given to the Commission of Inquiry for the International War Crimes Tribunal, and her participation in a trip to bring medical aid to Iraq in defiance of UN sanctions. Her current project, forming an Egyptian Women's Union, an umbrella group to unite and strengthen her homeland's fragmented women's movement, has already been declared illegal by a top government official, and promises to be a difficult challenge. But this type of struggle is what El Saadawi lives for. "I consider myself the voice of the silent majority in Egypt and the Arab world. My role is to change my people. That's my role. Because when you believe in something, you do."


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