The first book I read of Nawal had me in tears from the first chapter to the last one. I cried because someone could validate every feeling of anger I had towards the patriarchy. Through Nawal, I read about normalized misogyny in a way that unpacked it and refused to let it thrive. It shaped much more my understanding of freedom as something we must Imagine. Nawal used imagined freedom to create realities where women’s resistance is valid, and anger was an essential tool.
Writing about Nawal is very hard. I do not think I have the words to do a proper biography. This essay is nothing but a bit of a glimpse into an ocean of who Nawal was. I would encourage you to read her books, to re-read them if you can, to watch her interviews and realize that truly a revolutionary lived among us and left us liberatory words.
There is always a personal story behind a revolutionary
Born in Egypt on October 27th, 1931, It is said that Nawal was ahead of her time from a young age. However, I do not believe so. I strongly think she had the courage and the audacity to challenge cultural norms that were harmful to women yet very normalized and justified by both men and women. Nawal was the second of nine children. Her parents prioritized education and invested in Nawal’s brightest mind. From a young age, Nawal never missed an opportunity to challenge the patriarchy. This revolutionary spirit was a heritage from her dad, a freedom fighter during the 1919 Egyptian revolution against Egypt and Sudan’s British occupation.
At only ten years, Nawal refused to get married, and her parents took her side. She recalled informing with no fear to her grandmother that she intended not to get married. A statement that shocked her family and challenged the Egyptian cultural expectations of women as properties. Nawal kept a diary throughout her childhood, documenting her anger and conflict towards women and girls’ status in her country. She questioned the male-dominated and centered society. In 2015, Nawal published an edited version of all her childhood reflections in “The Diary of a child called Souad.”
Nawal shared not knowing she was African even though she was among those considered dark-skinned in Egypt. She wrote: “my childhood, I did not know that Egypt is in Africa. The Egyptian government under King Farouk did not consider Egypt as part of Africa. They followed the British colonizers, who divided Africa into Black and White.”[1]. The teachers at her school praised the upper-class girls with clear light skin, leaving Nawal, a young girl with skin considered dark from the working class, to grow with self-esteem issues. Colorism was also reinforced by her maternal family, who never missed an opportunity to make comments on how dark Nawal’s skin was. They would hide Nawal’s skin under white power and straighten her hair with a white iron until one day, Nawal discovered that Egypt is in Africa, not in the so-called Middle East, and found her freedom within her Africanness.
Nawal’s childhood was also made of her ongoing personal conflict with religion, democracy, and secularism. She narrated always asking her father how come the British colonialists had so much power over Egyptians. However, more importantly, how the state and the army used God’s will to harm the masses. Nawal wrote: “I used to see God in my dreams when I was a child. He was inseparable from Satan the Devil. When I started my childhood diary, both of them, God and Satan, were always together. I could not separate them in my imagination or reality. Imagination was inseparable from reality. When God resigned in any of my novels, Satan had to resign. Moreover, when Satan resigned, God had to resign. I found religion very much controlled by men and used as a tool to sustain women’s oppression. “
Nawal’s parents died when she was in her early 20’s. She became the family’s caretaker, pushing her to grow as fast as possible and embrace her version of womanhood. Unable to continue her education locally, Nawal went to Helwan school in Cairo. She was almost expulsed for writing a play on illegitimacy and for participating in nationalist demonstrations. In 1949, She entered Cairo University’s medical school. Nawal was not interested in medicine, but she pursued it as her parents’ choice because she was told there is no career future with literature. It did not stop her from writing. In 1958, she released her first novel, “Memoirs of a woman doctor,” with several short story collections. The book tells Nawal’s encounters with women’s physical and psychological problems and their connections with oppressive cultural practices, patriarchal oppression, class oppression, and imperialist oppression.
In 1964, Nawal relocated to her birthplace Kafr Tahla and could not stop herself from noticing the everyday hardships faced by rural women. She started teaching communities about the harms of Female circumcision. She was recalled to Cairo, following a report that she had disrespected moral values and “incited women to rebel against the divine laws of Islam.”
In 1972, she published “women and sex,” a masterpiece confronting and naming every single aggression towards women’s bodies, starting with female circumcision that she was a victim. The book turned out to be a significant success and a trend among second-wave feminism. As a consequence of daring to write dangerously, Nawal was dismissed from the ministry of health. This will be the beginning of continuous persecution and harassment from the state and government institutions.
Nawal did not give up; she continued to pen truth into power. In 1975, she released the magnificent novel “woman at point zero,” based on a real story of a sex worker she had met who was on death row for killing her pimp. In 1977, She published “The Hidden Face of Eve,” in which she documented her experiences as a village doctor witnessing sexual abuse and prostitution. It caused outrage, with critics accusing her of defying the order of society. Nevertheless, Nawal was just focused on speaking the truth and doing it fiercely.
In 1981, after being labeled dangerous by the Egyptian government, Nawal was arrested at President Anwar Sadat’s order. Even in prison, Nawal continued the fight against the oppression of women. While in prison, she formed the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association. To stop her from writing dangerously, she was denied pen and paper. However, that did not stop her from continuing to write. She used an eyebrow pencil and “a small roll of old and tattered toilet paper” to record her thoughts in a memoir she published In 1983: “ Memoirs from Prison.”.
After President Anwar was assassinated, Nawal was released from prison, but her books were banned in the entire country. Refusing to be stopped, she founded the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association (AWSA), combining feminism with pan-Arabism, right after from prison. In 1991, She joined the regional organizing against the gulf war and made Islamists unhappy with her bold voice. Her association was closed by the Egyptian government. When she discovered that her name was on a death list, she opted to leave the country.
In 1992, she relocated to North Carolina and taught dissidence and creativity at Duke University. She wrote her memoirs in exile and were published in two volumes as A Daughter of Isis (1999) and Walking Through Fire (2002).
In 1999, She returned to Egypt and tried running for the presidency. Unfortunately, She was forced to pull out of elections because of a constitutional amendment that made it hard for viable candidates to contest the polls for the first time [2]
In 2008, She won a lengthy court journey of an attempt to deprive her of her nationality and ban all her writings, prompted by her play God Resigns at the Summit Meeting (2006) that created an uproar in Egypt. Officials declared the work heretical and charged El Saadawi with insulting the “Almighty God,”
Nawal Saadawi was a humanitarian secularist feminist. She was against fundamental religions. She was against religious texts, religious rites, religious constitution, religious laws. In 2009, She established the Egyptian chapter of the Global Solidarity for Secular Society to fight against “religious fanaticism.” She petitioned the government to abolish Islam’s status as the state religion and remove state religion’s requirement on ID cards.
Nawal’s radicalness grew more substantial and more robust with age. She wrote in 2018 that she aspires to get more radical as the world deteriorates, our anger must multiply.
Throughout her life, Nawal published over 50 books that challenged the patriarchy in all ways possible.
References
[1] My Childhood in Egypt, Not Knowing I Was in Africa | by Nawal El Saadawi | ZORA (medium.com)
[2] Egypt presidential aspirant pulls out | News News | Al Jazeera
“Nawal El Saadawi | Egyptian physician, psychiatrist, author and feminist”. Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 7 March 2016.
“I don’t fear death: Egyptian feminist, novelist Nawal El Saadawi”. EgyptToday. Reuters. 24 May 2018. Retrieved 22 December 2019
“Nawal El Saadawi: ‘I am against stability. We need revolution'”. The Chronikler. Retrieved 19 November 2014.
“She Spoke the Unspeakable”, BBC One, Imagine, Winter 2017. Via Dailymotion.
“Nawal El Saadawi and a History of Oppression: Brief Biographical Facts”. Nawal El Saadawi.