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Nawal El-Saadawi |
‘People cannot lose if they resist’
Michael Mann meets the indomitable Nawal El-Saadawi, novelist and feminist icon of Egyptian literature
I still cringe when I remember my first meeting with Nawal El-Saadawi.
A few years ago, after a long assignment and hung over with jet lag, I spotted the well known Egyptian writer and feminist in a hotel foyer.
Deciding on a spur to try and for an impromptu interview I sprinted across the foyer and pushed my way into a tiny lift in which, it turned out, she was alone. Panting, I tried pleading my case for a quick chat but she soon cut me off and deftly stepped out at the first floor. As I cast a crestfallen glance at myself in the lift mirror it dawned on me that after I’d burst in sporting an unshaven mug and a dishevelled suit she’d probably mistaken me for one of the religious fanatics who’ve tried several times to do her in.
In her rise from an Egyptian Dr Finlay to feminist icon and acclaimed novelist and playwright, El-Saadawi has faced several assassination attempts, imprisonment by the Egyptian state and been blacklisted by its religious authorities. So it’s no surprise that along the way she’s learned to sidestep shifty-looking blokes.
This time, however, she was in London as several of her books were reprinted – and this time I had an appointment.
Watching from a comfortable seat in an Islington hotel I was struck that at 78 she’s lost none of her zip. Weaving between the tables she left her young assistant flat-footed, a blur of darting hands and dancing eyes under a swirling halo of white hair.
Still a straight talker – and politely overlooking our last calamitous encounter, she got straight to her main point: the peril facing women in the Middle East.
They’ve been set back “two or three generations” by events in Iraq, Palestine and the economic depression, she stated. The Iraq occupation unleashed the “monster of religion” and sectarian murder, of which women and girls have been the main victims, while long established protections were stripped under the American-sponsored legal changes. In Palestine Israel’s bombardment of Gaza killed mostly women and children, while its blockade has created mass joblessness and paved the way for religious conservatives. In Egypt, the region’s most important economy, half the population exists on less than the UN minimum two-dollars-a-day while the government, backed by America and Israel, smashes food demonstrations but refuses to implement laws banning genital mutilation – the ancient practice of slicing girls’ genitalia to preserve their “modesty” suffered by 96 per cent of married women. The root cause of this chaos she pins squarely on “colonialism”.
Nor does she fudge the question of President Obama’s bona-fides. “He writes well, he knows how to use words like ‘justice’, ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’. But he’s not very different from George Bush,” she said. “In fact he’s much more dangerous because he creates illusions. He’s more deceiving. People were dancing when he was elected. It was ridiculous. But they will be disappointed very soon.”
Growing up in a village by the Nile in British-occupied Egypt, El-Saadawi was had progressive parents who pushed her into medical school and creative writing. Her mother was modern but of the “generation of women … mostly from the upper-class, who took off the veil and thought this was liberation”. Her father worked his way up from the fields into the civil service. But it was at the knee of her peasant grandmother she learned her most important lessons: “She taught me God is not a book, God is not the Quran. God is justice. That was my first lesson in philosophy, in religion”. Whatever the extent of the old woman’s religious devotion it was her sense of battling for the underdog that stuck with the young El-Saadawi. Circumcision at six years-old left a “deep wound” in her body and spirit that “never healed” but sharpened a lifelong opposition to violence and exploitation meted out to women.
When as a village doctor by the Nile she saw first-hand how poverty and tradition blighted women and girls she was developed theories to improve health provision. Under Abdel Nasser’s nationalist government of the 1960s she became a top health official but fell from grace over her strident writing on women, health and sexuality. Imprisoned in 1981 she was freed when president Anwar Sadat was assassinated but appeared on fundamentalists’ hit-lists and spent almost a decade in self-imposed exile with her second husband, writer Sherif Hatata, lecturing in American universities. Her influential Egyptian women’s organisation and magazine were shut in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War, and Egypt’s Islamic and Church leaders blacklisted her books. She returned in the late 1990s and five years ago audaciously stood for Egyptian president on a platform of sweeping social reforms. Last year she overturned efforts by fundamentalists to strip her citizenship for her play, God.
One of the first to portray the grit of real life for ordinary women, El-Saadawi’s principal characters have been the peasant woman, the servant girl, the prostitute and the secretary. They deserve their own pedestal.
International awards followed the translation of her works in the 1980s but her stark portrayals of rape and violence against women split opinion back home. Hailed for her strident defence of poor women she’s also faced accusations she does more harm than good by hanging out the dirty laundry and pandering to Western stereotypes of misogynist Arabs. She’s now in the unusual position of being more cherished abroad than at home.
Her dogged fight against colonialism, traditional practices and chauvinism is mirrored in her private life where she divorced her first husband and raised her children to be as dissident as she is.
“I suffered a lot from religious education. I feel it hinders creativity and creates fear, and you cannot be creative when you are afraid. Creativity needs courage and criticism. Religion inhibits our critical mind,” she told an audience in Scotland. So she was determined not to “infect” her son and daughter. Laughingly she recalled how her daughter “threw away” her doctorate to write poetry and her son quit engineering to make “creative and dissident” films.
“There is a relationship between being creative and dissident. I inherited Islam from my father but as my grandmother taught it, God is justice and freedom not a book. So I gave [my children] the ideas of justice and freedom, the principle they should fight for justice, for freedom, for love, but not for a book. It’s not important to go to a mosque or church to pray ... I gave them the philosophy of happiness, to love justice, and I exposed them to other religions. When children are exposed to different religions, to different cultures, different philosophies, you save them.”
Always itching to have a go at a sacred cow, she argues language needs to be overhauled too – a risky business in a region where Arabic is officially venerated as the language of the Holy Quran.
“I do not agree with the glory of the Arabic language – nor the glory of the English language. We shouldn’t glorify any language. If you think about me as a writer, I am changing the language. We have to change the tool. We have to change it because language is very patriarchal and full of class. For instance, ‘God’ in the Quran is male, ‘God’ in the Bible is male, and ‘Christ’ is male … We have to be critical and we have to change language to make it more human, less racist, and more with women.”
She has, she insists, no plans to slip into quiet retirement just as religion and violence are rearing their heads and undoing decades of progress in the Middle East.
In Iraq, she said, women are “afraid to go into the street without the veil for fear they’ll be killed, raped, kidnapped or abused” and unsurprisingly are looking heavenward for help. “They veil themselves and even so-called educated people like professors pray to God for help. But they’ve forgotten God will never help them, that there is no God.
“They do it out of hopelessness, despair, feelings of weakness. It is choosing the easy way instead of challenging things. It’s a disease. But some people are coming out against it and there are other trends. In Egypt progressives are coming out against the veil. I am very optimistic because hope is power!”
Her eyes fired-up and she continued: “People cannot lose if they resist. People are naturally afraid of change but from the moment people start resisting they succeed – even if they fail in what they are doing. You see, it is resisting itself that is important. Even if the change has some negative effects, it has at least changed things which is better than stagnation. Movement and motion, that is the thing!” The familiar maverick grin swept her face and she briefly shook hands before darting off between the tables toward the lift, her young assistant trailing in her wake.
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