God Dies by the Nile and Other Novels

God Dies by the Nile, Searching, The Circling Song

Nawal El Saadawi, Sherif Hetata, Shirley Eber

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781783607457
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Literatura general

God Dies by the Nile is Saadawi's attempt to square religion with a society in which women are respected as equals; Searching expresses the poignancy of loss and doubt with the hypnotic intensity of a remembered dream; while in The Circling Song, Saadawi pursues the conflicts of sex, class, gender and military violence deep into the psyche.

GOD DIES
BY THE NILE

NAWAL EL SAADAWI

TRANSLATED BY SHERIF HETATA

INTRODUCTION

I was six or seven years of age when I heard about a poor peasant girl who drowned herself in the Nile – she had been working in the house of the village mayor. My grandmother whispered something that I didn’t understand in my mother’s ear. At the age of ten I heard about another girl who fled during the night. She was a servant in the same house, fourteen years old and pregnant. Nobody accused the mayor, except a young peasant who had been planning to marry the girl. He was shot in the fields and no-one was captured. In a dream, I saw the mayor in prison accused of raping servant girls and robbing the women of their harvest. When I told my grandmother, she said it was impossible, that the mayor was a god and no-one could punish him. She said that the mayor exploited the peasants to serve the king’s interest, and the king exploited the mayor and the peasants to serve the interests of the British army in the Suez canal. The word ‘god’ echoed around me but I didn’t know its real meaning and I instinctively didn’t like it. My parents gave my brother more freedom and more food than me, though I was better at school and helped my mother more. When I asked why, they told me that it is what God said. I felt that God was unjust like the mayor and the king, and that he deserved to be punished, but I kept this to myself.

These women and men in my village inspired me to write God Dies by the Nile. Zakeya is not very different from my grandmother and my aunts, relatives and neighbours. In addition to the oppression of colonial rule at that time, women were oppressed by men in the family, in society and in the streets. Poor women were more vulnerable than rich women.

In 1972 I published my first non-fiction book about women and sex. It was banned by the authorities and I was promptly dismissed from my post in the government. I found myself at home with nothing to do but write. I wrote fiction partly because I enjoyed it more, and partly because it seemed less likely to be banned – most of the censors were half-literate civil servants on low salaries, I did not imagine that they would read novels. I sat alone in my small apartment in Giza thinking about my new novel. I don’t know why my childhood memory came back to me, especially the image of the mayor and his men sitting smoking by the banks of the Nile, looking at the girls walking past with jars on their heads. The faces of my grandmother and other poor women in my family appeared vividly to me. I finished the novel in two months. Writing it gave me enormous pleasure, a pleasure which sustained me inside prison, and which is more essential to me than breathing.

At that time, Sadat was pursuing his so-called ‘open door policy’, opening Egypt to foreign, especially American, goods and investment. The result was increased poverty, unemployment, religious fundamentalism and the veiling of and discrimination against women. The Islamization of Egypt went hand in hand with the Americanization. The shops sold imported veils from the USA and Saudi Arabia and prayer mats from Mecca, alongside red lipstick and tight blue jeans. The majority of people in Egypt were deprived of their basic material needs. Our television screens were flooded with religious men preaching chastity, modesty, spirituality and the veil, interspersed with adverts that used naked women’s bodies to sell imported foreign goods. For women, the veil and female genital mutilation came to be part of authentic Islamic identity. I found it impossible to be silent. I published my articles in opposition newspapers and eventually found myself in prison, accused of betraying Egypt. One month later, however, in 1981, Sadat was assassinated and I was released by the new president.

God Dies by the Nile didn’t escape this climate of censorship and oppression. Like most of my work, it had to be published in Lebanon. My Lebanese publisher in Beirut changed the title to Death of the Only Man on Earth. He told me that God cannot die, and when I tried to explain that the word god is a symbol for the head of the village, he said ‘Yes, I know, but religious fanatics will not understand this and will burn my publishing house.’ This actually happened several years later. In 1982 God Dies by the Nile was published, with another fourteen of my books, by a publisher called Madbouli in Cairo. He used the Lebanese title. He said ‘They will burn my publishing house if I publish a book with a title like that. God does not die, he lives eternally.’

Thus the book was never published in Arabic with its original title, although it is reprinted to this day. Ten editions at least have come out since I wrote it. I think many women and men still read it. I have received many letters from readers saying that the village in the novel did not differ much from their village. Some men were angry and accused me of mocking Islam and encouraging heresy.

Though it was written more than thirty years ago, I feel that God Dies by the Nile still describes the life of peasant women and men in Egypt. The existing regime is no better than the Sadat regime – even worse. Poverty, American neocolonialism and religious fundamentalism have continued to rise. I visit my village every now and then and I see that it still resembles Zakeya’s village. Perhaps this is why people still read the book and why publishers still reprint it. The novel has been translated into many languages, including English, and I’m glad that its original title has not been changed. God still dies by the Nile.

Nawal El Saadawi

Cairo, 2006

I

Before the crimson rays of dawn touched the treetops, before the cry of the cock, the bark of a dog, or the bray of a donkey pierced through the heavy darkness, or the voice of ‘Sheikh Hamzawi’ echoed in the silence with the first call to prayer, the big wooden door opened slowly, creaking, with the rusty sound of an ancient water-wheel. A tall, upright shadow slipped through and advanced on two legs with a powerful steady stride. Behind, followed a second shadow, on four legs which seemed to bend beneath it, as it slouched forwards with a lazy, ambling gait.

The two shadows disappeared into the darkness to emerge out of it again over the river bank. Zakeya’s face stood out in the pale light of dawn, gaunt, severe, bloodless. The lips were tightly closed, resolute, as though no word could ever pass through them. The large, wide-open eyes fixed on the horizon expressed an angry defiance. Behind her, the head of the buffalo nodded up and down, its face gaunt and bloodless, but not unkind, its wide-open eyes humble, broken, resigned to whatever lay ahead.

The light of dawn glimmered on the river, revealing the minute waves, like tiny wrinkles in an old, sad, silent face. Deep underneath, its waters seemed immobile, their flow as imperceptible as a moment of passing time, or the slow movement of the clouds in the dark sky.

In the wide-open spaces the air, too, was hushed and silent. It slipped through the branches of the trees so gently that they barely moved, but it continued to carry the fine, invisible particles of dust from over the high bank of the river, down the slope to the dark, mud huts huddled in rows, their tiny windows closed, their low, uneven roofs stacked with mounds of dry cotton sticks, cakes of dung and straw, then further down into the narrow twisting lanes and alleys blocked with manure, and on to the stream which completed the village contour, where they settled to form a dark, slimy, oozing layer covering its green water.

Zakeya continued to walk with the buffalo behind her, her legs moving at the same unchanging pace, as unchanging as the set look on her face, as the immobile waters of the river to her left, as everything else in these last moments of the night. But to her right there was a slow shift as the mud huts started to pass behind, and the fields emerged before her eyes like a green ribbon laid out parallel to the Nile.

She advanced between the two stretches of green and brown with the same swinging movement starting from the hips and thighs. Overhead, the black night withdrew gradually as the crimson hue of dawn spread out, then, after a while, changed to a glaring, orange light. Suddenly, over the edge of the earth a point of sun shone out, grew slowly to become a disc of fire, then climbed up into the sky. But before the light of day had chased away the night, Zakeya had already reached her field, tied the buffalo to the water-wheel beside the stream, removed her black shawl and put it on the ground, rolled up her sleeves, and tied the tail of her galabeya^* around her waist.

Now her hoe could be heard, thudding out over the neighbouring fields with a steady sound, as it cut deep into the ground. The muscles in her arms stood out, and below the black galabeya knotted tightly around her waist, the long powerful legs showed naked and brown in the morning light; the features of her face were still the same, still sharp, still gaunt, no longer pale, but dark with the leathery tan bitten into them by heat and dust, and sun and open space. Yet deep underneath was the same pallor which her skin revealed before and now concealed. Her body no longer stood upright. It was bent over the hoe as she dug away in the soil. Her eyes did not look at the ground, were not fixed to her feet. They were the same. They had not changed. They were raised, fixed to some distant point with the same angry defiance which looked out of them before. And the blows of her hoe seemed to echo with an anger buried deep down as she lifted it high up in the air and swung it down with all her might into the soil.

Its blows resounded with their regular sound like the muffled strokes of a clock striking out the hour. They devoured time, moved forwards machine-like, cut into the earth hour after hour. They never tired, never broke down, or gasped for breath, or sought respite. They went on with a steady thud, thud, thud echoing in the neighbouring fields throughout the day, almost inhuman, relentless, frightening in the fury of their power. Even at midday, when the men broke off for a meal and an hour of rest, they went on without a stop. The buffalo might cease turning round and round for a short while, and the water-wheel would stop creaking for a moment, but her hoe kept on falling and rising, rising and falling from sky to earth, and earth to sky.

The sun rose up in the sky gradually. Its disc turned into a ball of fire, choking the wind, bearing down on the trees, turning everything into solid dryness, so that all things seemed to suffocate, burn in its red fire, and dry up, except the rivulets of sweat pouring down from Zakeya’s face and body on to the ground. Beneath the sweat her face was livid like the face of the buffalo turning round and round beneath its yoke.

The hours passed. The sun began to lean towards the earth in a slow, sweeping movement. Its flames no longer burned with the same ire. The heat subsided, and the air stirred, wafting a soft breeze with it from the waters of the Nile. The tree tops swayed from side to side unwillingly, as though spent out. Once more the sky was bathed in a glaring, orange light, gradually swept aside by the sad, grey hue of beginning twilight. The sweat on her face dried up leaving a layer of dust behind like ashes on a dying fire. She threw the hoe on one side, stretched the muscles of her back and stood upright. She looked around for a moment as though awakened in the night, then rolled down her sleeves and untied the knotted folds of her long, black garment before letting it drop down over her legs to the ground. She drew the shawl around her head, and stepped out of the field on to the dusty track. A few moments later she was once more a dark shadow walking back over the same path, with the same steady step, and with the buffalo plodding slowly behind. Now the green expanses of the fields were to her left, and the brown waters of the Nile on her right. In the distance the trees had become slender black silhouettes etched against the greying sky. The sun had dropped below the earth, and to the west, its crimson light no longer fought against the dusk.

The two shadows travelled slowly over the dusty track on the river bank. Her shadow was the same: tall, upright with the head rising straight above the neck. It moved as though advancing to attack. The second shadow too had not changed one bit. It slouched along, completely spent, its step resigned, its head still bent. They advanced over the river bank, two silent shadows in the deepening night. Nothing moved in the whole wide world around, nothing moaned or sighed or cried or even spoke. Only silence in the silent night spreading its cloak over the fields stretched out on the other side, over the waters of the Nile, over the sky above their heads, over everything on the ground.

Slowly the fields swung back behind them, and the huts emerged in front, small, dark, indistinct shadows huddling up for support or shelter against the river bank or perhaps afraid of sliding down into the dust-covered expanse of low land.

The two shadows descended the slope into the ditch, and got lost in the narrow twisting lanes, as they glided furtively along between the houses. They came to a stop in front of the big wooden door. Zakeya opened it with a push of her powerful fist and it gave way with a heavy creaking sound. She dropped the rope by which she held the buffalo. It ambled in through the open door and went on towards the stable. She watched it go in for a moment, then squatted in the entrance to the house with her back up against the wall and her eyes facing the open door, so that she could see the part of the lane which lay beyond it.

She sat immobile, her eyes staring into the darkness as though fixed on something she perceived in front of her. Perhaps what had caught her attention was nothing but a mound of manure piled up near the entrance to her house, or the stools of a child, lying on the ground, where it had s...