AN ARABIAN CONSCIENCE: NAWAL EL SAADAWI (1931-2021)
SHE WAS EGYPT’S FINEST WRITER She brought feminism to the forefront of intellectual and political thinking in some very dark places, not uncommon in all cultures.
■ Satendra Nandan’s forthcoming book, LIFE-Journeys: Love & Grief , will be published later this year. He’s currently working on a book on Mahatma Gandhi and Rev CF Andrews at the Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture, Charles Sturt University.
In the turmoil of ripping yarns emanating from the Federal Parliament in Canberra, in our COVID-19 stricken world, with floods and coups, one may not have noticed the death of Egypt’s finest writer who brought the subjugation of women in a culture of cruelty to the fore of modern consciousness.
All her life El Saadawi fought for freedom and women’s liberation. And died last week, aged 89.
Egypt, as we know, is an ancient world of many layers, the most recent being ruled by dictators when the hope of an Arab Spring turned to the withering winter of despair.
As I’m scribbling these lines, the passage in the Suez Canal is blocked: a huge ship is stranded like a mighty whale from the great biblical flood. I was a young student in Fiji during the Suez crisis that ended the AngloFrench imperial adventure in that part of the world.
The year, if I recall correctly, was
1956.
Under Gamal Abdel Nasser Egypt acquired an international prestige and joined the Non-aligned Movement with Nehru’s India showing the Third Way as the Cold War was heating up between two superpowers, the US and the Soviet Union, rising from the ashes of the horrors of World War II. Towards the end of that decade, I was in Delhi, briefly the centre of the new emerging world of postcolonial possibilities. And Nehru was shining like a golden disc in the firmament of international political relations.
It was great to be in Delhi in the late fifties and early sixties. To be young was very heaven.
Pandit Nehru died in 1964. An era came to an end.
But he did show a way: he had wielded his pen and voice to great effect.
A pen is mightier than the sword
One way to counteract the repressions and brutality of guns is to use your pen as writers and journalists, painters and filmmakers, and continue to defy the depredations of morally bankrupt rulers.
In the name of cultural identity awful things are done to people, especially women. “My culture, my culture”, as the Australian prime minister implied recently is full of “crap” and “rubbish” in a tearful recognition of the plight of many women even in so affluent an Oz society.
The centre of his life, he publicly confessed, were his widowed mother, his wife and two daughters. It was all deeply moving to watch on television.
Despite a couple of missteps, the PM came out as a caring, reformist PM.
In the final analysis, it is the personal that is truly political.
Your unassailable identity is your own story, made of many strands and interweaving lives.
We’re often told that you live in your stories. This may be a cliché but like all cliches, it contains a kernel of an elemental truth. It’s our stories that make up our lives, giving them shape, sequence and significance.
Most myths and epics are about high caste heroes: ordinary people hardly feature. But it is really the ordinary lives that make us extraordinary.
Think of William Shakespeare or M K Gandhi or even Jesus Christ. Think of their humble beginnings and endless humility.
Writing came rather late
In our part of the unwritten world, writing came rather late.
We boast of a 60,000-year-old history of this oldest continuous cultural stream on the island continent of Australia. Today, we recognise the miracle of survival of the Aboriginal universe, broken but still breathing.
The rock carvings and cave shrines have stories to tell in those indelible narratives of dreaming and song lines.
Of course, the written civilisations have dominated the world in the past three millennia at least. The epics of local quarrels have travelled to other lands, across seas, orally and later in the written words, embellished and embroidered often as divine truths. The centuries of literacy developed more dramatically with the invention of the printing press and other technological advancement of the communication revolution.
We seem to have reached the zenith of our modern civilisation with social media. This, as they say, is the Moment.
The crisis of the century is around us. Desperately, we search for remedies, but we’re still caught in the net of our prejudices and false pride: national, cultural and egotistical.
This Easter may give us a pause for thought: 2000 years ago, an innocent individual was crucified between two thieves. “I find no fault in this man,” said Pontius Pilate. And washed his hands.
Imagine if the mob had asked that Jesus be freed: but they wanted Barabbas.
The Romans had a brutal and brutalising way of punishing people.
And most civilising missions have followed that pitiless pattern of punishment of dissenting voices beyond the wilderness of deserts from which came the prophets.
But not Peace.
Nawal El Saadawi
I’m reminded of these ignominious crimes because a few days ago Nawal El Saadawi died: she too was profoundly concerned with so many barbaric practices in her society especially against women and girls.
She was Egypt’s finest writer. To call her merely a feminist author will be an injustice to a mind that created such a complex awareness of the state of Arab women and lifted the veil off many oppressions.
Allah, her illiterate grandmother told her, was Justice. And the wounds and sorrows must be revealed to be healed.
She brought feminism to the forefront of intellectual and political thinking in some very dark places, not uncommon in all cultures.
Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian chronicler, of course won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but he too, paid a heavy price and was almost stabbed to death by fanatics.
Writers seem to arouse a special kind of ill-will among mainly those ogres who can barely read.
We often forget in our prejudices that some of the most radical reformists and creative poets were born in the Middle East.
And they loved their flasks of wine and that book of verse.
In my own lifetime the case of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie became the great cause célèbre. A book shook the world.
But thank Allah Salman Rushdie is still writing his stories. His personal story of the fatwa terror is most powerfully told in his memoir of that dreadful decade of desolation in Anton Joseph.
The book glows with the courage of a writer. And the sustaining power of words and stories in which he dwelt in such solitary confinement for more than eleven years.
Nawal El Saadawi was in the same category. Jailed for her beliefs, fighting for the liberation of her sisters from the practices of the dark ages. She was jailed by Anwar Sadat.
But her writing continued on rolls of toilet paper with an eyebrow pencil borrowed from a more privileged prisoner.
She went on to write more than 50 books, many translated into other languages. “I belong to no country: I belong to the world,” she declared.
I was reminded of this remarkable woman in the turmoil in and around the Australian Parliament that is relentlessly dominating the news every evening: revelation after revelation of the misdemeanours of a few people in petty power, dressed in their immaculately immoral suits and causing so much distress.
The world of decency to women seems to be collapsing daily. But women are fighting and fighting for justice, equality and decency: changing the corrupt culture of an institution where laws are made and enacted. Changing society. Changing us. Sexism is older than the tyranny of racism. Often, constructed patriarchy uses tradition to justify many indefensible practices.
No culture is free from such shameless, and disgusting practices.
That it should happen in the most important capital in our region can leave one feeling quite hopeless.
And this is why we should not only read this late Egyptian writer who brought the Creative Spring to her people, but we should be writing our stories, sad and beautiful, about our own great grandmothers, mothers, sisters, wives, friends, on whose lives and the milk of human kindness and sacrifices we’ve grown.
There’s no greater story than your own. And, only you know it most intimately and inspiringly.
We can write at least one book. Our own story of a place ,a people, a valued life: for ‘life’ is the most precious four-letter word.
Even if it happens to be your own.