{"id":11633,"date":"2011-10-21T12:39:14","date_gmt":"2011-10-21T08:39:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/?p=11633"},"modified":"2011-10-21T12:39:14","modified_gmt":"2011-10-21T08:39:14","slug":"nawal-al-saadawi-writer-or-politician-first","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/editors-choice\/nawal-al-saadawi-writer-or-politician-first\/","title":{"rendered":"Nawal al-Saadawi: Writer or Politician First?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Earlier this week, Egyptian author and activist Dr. Nawal al-Saadawi told BBC4 that she is at work on a new novel. When asked if the new novel would reflect events in Tahrir Square at the beginning of this year,\u00a0Dr. al-Saadawi said<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cOf course. I became a different person, and a better human being. \u2026 I will describe how in Tahrir Square, we lived a dream, in which we are\u00a0equal.\u201d<\/p>\n

Al-Saadawi is in London this week to celebrate her upcoming 80th birthday. She received a UK \u201cWomen of the Year Outstanding Achievement<\/a>\u201d award on Monday, and will be appearing at the\u00a0Frontline Club<\/a>\u00a0today to discuss her work.<\/p>\n

Al-Saadawi has been far more involved in political activism than in Egypt\u2019s literary development, but she has found time to publish 11 novels, eight short story collections, several plays, memoirs, and other works of non-fiction. More than two dozen of al-Saadawi\u2019s works have been translated into English, most published by al-Saqi or Zed Books. This may well put her at the most well-translated author (in English) after Naguib Mahfouz.<\/p>\n

And I ask this very naively: Why does she let Zed put covers like these on her books?<\/p>\n

Her most well-known and powerful works are probably\u00a0Woman at Point Zero, God Dies by the Nile, The Hidden Face of Eve, Memoirs of a Woman Doctor<\/em>, and\u00a0Memoirs from the Women\u2019s Prison.<\/em><\/p>\n

Although she has seen a great deal of life here in Egypt (hesba cases and all<\/a>), Al-Saadawi\u2019s work has in many ways had a greater impact in the West. Juliet O\u2019Keefe wrote in 2008,\u00a0in\u00a0Dissent Magazine<\/em><\/a>, aboutThe Hidden Face of Eve<\/em>: \u201cFor me, as for many other young (white, North American) feminists in the early 1980s, the horror of genital mutilation, of which we had largely been ignorant, overwhelmed us, and \u2013 and I say this carefully \u2013 fixed to an unfortunate degree our opinions on women\u2019s situation under Islam.\u201d<\/p>\n

I will note, as O\u2019Keefe does, that FGM is practiced in many African countries (of which Egypt is one), and is not a specifically \u201cIslamic\u201d practice. Nor did al-Saadawi ever claim it was a Muslim practice, I don\u2019t think. But O\u2019Keefe notes \u201cwe took from the book a one-dimensional afterimage of the\u00a0Arab woman as wholly victimised and held under the thumb of a rigid, ahistoric theocracy.\u201d I guess I can be glad that, in the 1980s, I was still a young, pale-skinned primary-school student.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Keefe adds that, for her and others, \u201cEl Saadawi was seen as anomalous and isolated, granted the position of singular representative for Arabic women\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n

Al-Saadawi\u2019s role in this re-presentation is not entirely clear (to me). O\u2019Keefe adds that the publisher certainly had a part:<\/p>\n

But it is difficult not to read some conscious manoeuvring, awareness of audience, into other changes made between the Arabic original and the English text (documented exhaustively by Amal Amireh) which include the foregrounding of the issue of genital mutilation at the expense of political material; the harrowing opening of the book, describing El Saadawi\u2019s own experience of circumcision, was situated differently in the original, and less sensationally.<\/p>\n

You can also see the covers above. It is difficult to understand quite how al-Saadawi would have agreed to them, although I say that having heard other authors furious at their exoticizing covers and introductions.<\/p>\n

Al-Saadawi\u2019s novels have often been criticized as mere vessels for her political messages. They certainly do have a message, and sometimes the literary joy is ossified by it. But elsewhere the writing is direct, clear, and lovely.<\/p>\n

Amal Amireh wrote, in\u00a0Al Jadid<\/em>, that \u201cI agree that el-Saadawi is popular in the West partly because her works have played into Western prejudices. But I don\u2019t think this fact should be merely used to dismiss her achievement.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

M. LYNX QUALEY: She’s just approaching her 80th birthday and has begun work on a new novel set in Tahrir Square. A divisive character is she first and foremost a political activist or writer? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":11634,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[154],"tags":[125,18300,18291,630,5462,931,399,18337,5464],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11633"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11633"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11633\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11634"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}