As she herself explains in the introduction to the Spanish edition of her novel Woman at zero pointNawal El Saadawi lives alone in a small flat in the Shubra neighbourhood of Cairo at the age of eighty-five, and the only value in her life is "to continue writing, to continue breaking taboos and to continue opening the way for minds besieged by the fear of the hell of God and the prison of the president". The Spanish translation of this work, which was first published in Arabic in 1975 and has been translated into 22 languages, has been followed earlier this year by a new, updated and expanded Spanish edition of The hidden face of Eve. Women in Arab countriesconsidered a classic of modern Arabic literature and originally published in English in 1977.
El Saadawi's struggle against the oppression of women, and especially her attempt to actively organise women in that endeavour, has earned her both international recognition and continuous harassment by the Egyptian authorities throughout her life. Born in Egypt in 1931, this psychiatrist, writer and women's rights activist has faced unfair dismissal - she was expelled from her post as director of the Department of Health Education in the Ministry of Public Health - arbitrary censorship - such as the closure of the Health Education Association and the magazine attached to it, of which she was the editorial director - numerous lawsuits and pending cases - such as the one that threatened to withdraw her nationality for her play God submits his resignation at the meeting of the She was imprisoned for a few months during Anwar al-Sadat's rule, and even went into exile following political pressure and Islamist threats against her and her family. El Saadawi has taught at prestigious international universities, worked as an advisor to the UN, and her numerous awards include the Council of Europe's North-South Prize, which she was awarded in 2004.
The validity of the circumstances denounced by El Saadawi in her works - as in the two reviewed here, although they were published in the 1970s - is demonstrated by the fact that some of them are still banned in her native country, although, as the author herself explains, new technologies have allowed many young people to access her writings, because "Science has declared its victory over the myths that used to occupy minds (...)". Thus, in the introduction to the new Spanish version of The hidden face of Eve (Kailas, 2017)El Saadawi explains how in 2016 practices such as female genital mutilation continue to be carried out, despite the fact that the 2008 Egyptian law prohibits female genital mutilation, and cites recent UN data, which puts the number of women who have been cut at around 200 million worldwide, with Egypt at the top of the list, with 25% of this total. Other practices such as women's difficulty in obtaining a divorce or the possibility for men to marry four wives are also still the order of the day in the country. The author even devotes an epigraph to 'Slaves of the 21st century', in which she laments how many young women today only aspire to marry a good husband, given the impossibility of finding work, while in 30% of Egyptian households it is the woman who brings home the income through precarious occupations, while their husbands are unemployed. Thus, "The majority of the poor are wage-earning women who feed their families and children under the despotic power of their husbands, deprived of a political organisation to defend their interests".
In the foreword, El Saadawi includes an article from May 2016, which the Egyptian authorities forbade her to publish in a newspaper and which the author finally managed to leak to some internet portals. Entitled 'Is the child an atheist?', El Saadawi discusses the right to develop one's own individual concept of god without being labelled an atheist, and the role of religion as a tool of the ruling political forces to "dominate the minds of the people and divide them into religious denominations".
The hidden face of Evewhich first appeared in Spanish in 1991 under the name of The naked face of the Arab womanThe book is a compilation of the experiences and research of the author, who practised as a doctor and psychiatrist in urban and rural areas over a number of years. It is a raw and stark portrait of the origin, evolution and consequences of discrimination against women in the world, and specifically in Arab countries, which had a great impact when it was published and is still shocking today. The first part of the book, 'The Mutilated Half', examines the physical and psychological consequences of female circumcision, which El Saadawi herself, despite coming from an educated and well-to-do family, suffered during her childhood, as it was a widespread practice in society at the time, regardless of social class. After this traumatic experience and after reflecting on the discriminatory treatment of girls, El Saadawi decided to dedicate her professional life to "unmasking the hypocrisy of the society we live in; a society that preaches virtue and morality, but does not put them into practice". The most obvious proof of the latter is the frequent abuse of girls, and even rape, by family members, neighbours or teachers, in the face of the sexual repression imposed as a norm on a society. hymencentricmore concerned with hypothetical honour than with justice and truth. The author reviews aspects such as the pre-Islamic origin of the practice of female circumcision, marriage and divorce in Islamic societies, birth control, abortion and fertility.
The second and third parts of this work deal with the role of women from the earliest times of civilisation in ancient Egypt, when there was a matrilineal system in which sons bore their mothers' surnames, older daughters inherited, and goddesses and gods coexisted. The aim of this historical overview, including the view of women in Arabic literature, is to understand the situation of women in contemporary Arab-Islamic society. El Saadawi makes use of anthropologist Marvin Harris's theories of cultural materialism to explain how the accumulation of surplus led to the development of private property and the consequent erosion of the status and situation of women. At the basis of this involution would thus be the establishment of the patriarchal family, land ownership and class division. It is therefore necessary to take into account this relationship between the economic and social infrastructure and the position of women in order to explain the involution of their role until they became a mere appendage - Adam's rib - as taken up by Judaism and, later, by the other monotheistic religions, as well as their association with sin and sin with sex. Christianity cements the negative notion of woman, who is now body/sex, as opposed to the idea of man, created in the image and likeness of God. With patriarchy came prostitution and extramarital relations, and with these, the concept of illegitimate children. For El Saadawi, the polygamy historically attributed to Arabs and Muslims has existed in all societies, the latter being more direct in its legal implementation, rather than its denial, as occurred in other cultures and religions. Islam thus strengthened polygamy, which "responded to the needs of that society: the continuous tribal fighting and the number of deaths it caused, the need to build the new Islamic order and the large number of female prisoners of war and slaves", but it did not introduce anything new with respect to the order established in pre-Islamic societies, although it did improve the living conditions of slaves. According to El Saadawi, the concealment of women and the practice of removing them from public life, which became widespread after the birth of Islam, is based on the premise that women "are strong and not weak, active and not passive, capable of destruction and difficult to destroy; and if there is anyone who needs protection, it is precisely man".
The last part of The hidden face of EveThe Breaking Point', focuses on the achievements in the field of women's liberation, reviewing the contributions of the precursors of women's liberation and the outstanding works on the subject, as well as the obstacles that have stood in the way of women's liberation up to the present day. Like other feminists in her geographical and cultural environment, including the Moroccan Fatima Mernissi, a leading figure in the struggle for women's rights in the Arab world, El Saadawi undertakes an exercise in exegesis of the Koran and the sayings of the prophet in search of arguments in support of women's equality. It is important to stress that for El Saadawi the oppression of women does not depend on the religion practised in their environment, but on the patriarchal and class system in which we live and, in short, on capitalism and current neoliberalism, although religion is used by the political powers to perpetuate this oppression. For this advocate of socialism, whose principles emerge throughout this book, the conclusion is obvious: "In Arab countries, in the West and in the Far East, the true liberation of women requires the total abolition of class society, of exploitation and of the patriarchal system". Emancipation, therefore, will only be possible through the organised struggle of women in a political force that defends their interests.
With Woman at zero point (Captain Swing, 2017)Nawal El Saadawi illustrates with a specific example some of the circumstances that condition the lives of women in the Arab world and that are reflected in the previous work, using fiction as a tool, although based on a true story. The author again draws on her experience as a psychiatrist to write this novel, which came about while she was conducting research into female neurosis, a task to which she devoted herself after losing her job at the Ministry of Health. Her fieldwork led her to meet Fardaous, the fictitious name of the book's protagonist, a prisoner in a women's prison north of Cairo. Sentenced to hang for the murder of a pimp, Fardaous agrees to talk to El Saadawi the day before her death. The interview takes the form of a first-person account in which the protagonist recounts the circumstances that have led her to her current situation. With a mixture of apprehension and horror, we follow the milestones in the life of this orphan girl, the unwitting embodiment of so many hundreds of thousands or millions around the world, from the Egypt of the 1970s reflected in the play to the unaccompanied minors in refugee camps today.
After the death of her parents, Fardaous moved to her uncle's house in Cairo, where she was first abused. Gifted in her studies, she was forced to leave the boarding school where her uncle had enrolled her to live with him and his wife as a servant. After her arranged marriage to a well-to-do and miserly old man who mistreats her, Fardaous decides to escape her fate, beginning a journey that will show her the inevitability of a cursed destiny when society has no place of dignity to welcome you since you came into the world with the wrong sex.
After several years of abuse and mistreatment, including a job in a large company where it is only possible to be promoted by offering sexual favours to the bosses, the protagonist finds refuge in prostitution, realising that although the life of a woman is always unhappy, that of a prostitute is "a little bit better", since "to protect honour you need large sums of money, but it is not possible to obtain so much money without losing honour".
Woman at zero point The film thus becomes a nihilistic song, a flight forward for those who expect nothing from life, to the extent that the protagonist rejects the possibility of writing a letter of appeal to the president to commute her death sentence to life imprisonment, after the murder of the pimp who made her existence impossible:
"I expect nothing.
Nothing I wish for.
I fear nothing.
I am free.
What enslaves us in life are our desires, our hopes, our fears.
To understand the revolutionary character of this work and its potential impact - as well as the extraordinary courage of its author, for whom Fardaous "despite prostituting herself had more honour than the prophets and the saints" - it must be borne in mind that no publishing house in Egypt would accept its publication, and it was finally published in Beirut, at the time a haven for censored writers throughout the region.
Leaving aside the debatable literary merits of her work, there is no doubt about the pioneering nature of Nawal El Saadawi's scientific and editorial work, as well as the integrity and courage of a woman who has risked her professional career and even her life to denounce the injustices faced by women in general, and in Arab-Islamic countries in particular, and to vindicate the need to combat them. According to the author, in the months leading up to the popular uprisings against former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in February 2011 and up to the present day, her house has become the "Nawal El Saadawi Meeting Place", a meeting place for young people and a centre for literary and ideological debates, proving once again that neither censorship nor reprisals, let alone the passing of the years, can put an end to her unwavering struggle against oppression.
Published on 17/03/17
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