Walking through Fire

The Later Years of Nawal El Saadawi, In Her Own Words

Nawal El Saadawi, Sherif Hetata

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786993120
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

'Words should not seek to please, to hide the wounds in our bodies, or the shameful moments in our lives. They may hurt, give us pain, but they can also provoke us to question what we have accepted for thousands of years.' Nawal El Saadawi is one of the greatest writers to come out of the Arab world. Born in a small Egyptian village in 1931, her life and writings have shown an extraordinary strength of character and a unique ability to create new worlds in the fight against oppression. Saadawi has been pilloried, censored, imprisoned and exiled for her refusal to accept the oppression imposed on women by gender and class. Still, she continues to write. In A Daughter of Isis, Nawal El Saadawi painted a beautifully textured portrait of the childhood that moulded her into a novelist and fearless campaigner for freedom and the rights of women. Walking through Fire takes up the story of her extraordinary life. We read about her as a rural doctor, trying to help a young girl escape from a terrible fate imposed on her by a brutal male tyranny. We learn about her activism for female empowerment and the authorities that try to obstruct her. We travel with her into exile after her name is put on a fundamentalist death list. We witness her three marriages, each offering in their way love, companionship and shared struggle. And we gain an unprecedented insight into this most wonderful of creative minds.

1

The Threat

It is spring. A flood of green is sweeping over Duke forest. The sky, turquoise blue, carries me back to my village. I am in North Carolina, a southern state on the East Coast of America, in a small town called Durham. People in Durham look up at the sky and say this is Carolina blue.

It is the early spring of 1993. The windows in our house look out onto a rose garden. The roses have started to bloom blood-red, snow-white, amber-yellow, orange and silver-grey. Through my open pores the scent of roses steals its way into my body, a first warm breath after the cold of winter.

Here, reality is like a dream. I open my arms, stretch my body, touch it with the tips of my fingers in search of certitude. The only certitude is my body, yet to me it seems like the body of another woman. The woman who is called Professor Dr Saadawi, three strange names which I hear being pronounced by people every day, by students sitting in attentive rows in the same way as I used to sit, more than forty years ago, in the auditorium of the medical college in Cairo University.

I get out of bed slowly, afraid of waking up from the dream, creep over to the mirror. There she is, standing tall, her shoulders slightly bent, her skin brown like the silt brought down by the Nile, her hair snow white, thick, tossing around her head, her nightgown of white cotton crumpled with a pattern of small flowers scattered over it.

I look down at her feet. They are big feet like those of her grandmother and she wears cheap rubber slippers bought from a small store in her village, Kafr Tahla. As she stands there a man walks in, watches her for a moment, then says ‘Sabah El Kheir,^* Nawal’, and her memory comes back as she replies ‘Sabah El Kheir, Sherif.’

Sherif had travelled with her to Duke University at the beginning of January. In Egypt her name had figured on a death list drawn up by a fundamentalist movement. Her life was threatened, so the authorities placed armed guards in front of her flat, and a bodyguard accompanied her wherever she went. When the opportunity came she decided to leave the country.

She looks around in surprise. Her eyes travel over the beautiful old house, the rose garden, the maple trees. Here she is in these wonderful surroundings teaching a course on dissidence and creativity, a subject she loves. Her students make teaching a pleasure, call out to her ‘Professor Saadawi’ as she walks through the campus. Yet, exile means exile, and there is nothing she can do to change it.

I stand at the window, look out at the sunshine streaming down on expanses of green, on elm trees fluttering with new leaves after the bareness of winter, on tall pines singing in the wind, on triangular conifers reflecting the circles of morning light like Christmas trees, on thousands of anonymous forest trees. For me, they seem to grow wild, to multiply endlessly over expanses of American soil stretching to a horizon I cannot see. I watch their tops being touched by the sun, or turning black under a cloud. I remember the stories told to me by my grandmother and they are transformed into witches or devils, their long tresses hanging down on either side of their heads as they reach up into darkness.

Throughout my life devils have surrounded me. In my village, when I was still a child, I used to look for them. In Cairo, after I had grown up, they looked for me. Often they carried other names like ‘the visitors of the dawn’, men who turn up just before dawn, before the red rays of the sun begin to colour the sky, when people are still plunged deep in sleep, in that phase of sleep we call the minor death where you do not dream, or where, if you dream, the dream is not remembered. It is at this particular time of the night that the visitors of the dawn start moving, steal through the streets and up stairs, to stand behind a door and listen. Then they ring the bell. If no-one answers they knock. If no-one opens they break it down or prise it open with an instrument that does it silently.

My memoirs, written on sheets of greyish paper, keep piling up on my desk. After leaving Egypt I started to write. The threat of death seemed to give my life a new importance, made it worth writing about. I felt that the closer I moved towards death, the greater became the value of my life. Nothing can defeat death like writing. Were it not for the Old Testament, Moses and Judaism would not have lived on. Were it not for the New Testament, Jesus Christ and Christianity would have died off long ago. And were it not for the Qur’an, the prophet Muhammad and Islam would not have survived to this day.

Is that why writing was forbidden to women and slaves?

I had spent the last five years of my life away from Egypt. For four years I lived in Durham, working as a visiting professor at Duke University. Every morning I walked from my house in Sylvan Road to the campus. To reach the campus I had to cut through a small forest, slipping through the tree trunks on my rubber shoes, listening to the sound of their tread in the whispering silence, to the crackle of leaves under their soles, or the occasional song of a coloured bird hidden in the foliage, filling me with a yearning for the voice of my daughter calling out to me in the morning. When the sun’s rays fell on my face I would remember the winter sun in Cairo, then look up at the sky and feel that nowhere in the world had I seen a blue as pure, as limpid as this, with not a speck of dust, or a particle of smoke. A filtered blue without impurities, a limitless sky extending to the Atlantic Ocean, without mountains, or frost, or snow, just sun and sunlight, just elms and pines and conifers, from spring through summer, to autumn, from green to a celebration of colours red, blue, violet, yellow, brown, russet and golden into the black, white and grey of winter. I look up at the sky and there, soaring above my head, is a bird, a single bird, blue and green with red legs, the likes of which I have never seen. Then once more, suddenly, the silence of the forest under the deep, motionless, endless expanses of blue, the awe of complete silence, and of nature creeping through my veins, and up there the sun, the ancient Egyptian sun god Ra’a, my eyes captivated by the power of his light, by his head creeping out behind a filmy cloud, by his hair long like that of Noot, the goddess of the sky.

Images float through my mind. I am the goddess Isis, the daughter of Noot, standing on a stage in the big hall of my primary school more than fifty years ago. I touch my dead husband Osiris with the tips of my fingers and bring him back to life. I am a young child walking on the bank of the River Nile. I look into the waters, watch the little waves shining in the dark night like silver fishes.

They part, and out of the depths rises a woman. She is half-naked and sits on the bank combing her hair. She smiles at me like a mother, with tenderness, but I run away from her afraid that she will grab me and devour me in the deep waters.

How did the female goddess who was capable of restoring life to the dead become transformed into a witch who devours children? I never asked myself this question until I reached the age of twenty-five, until I had become a young physician in my village, carrying a torch in my hand as I walked through the night looking for what my grandmother used to call ogres or witches or devils.

The winds blow in from the Atlantic Ocean to strike this small town in the south of the United States. High waves sweep the deserted shores eighty miles away. Huge white birds bigger than the seagulls I have seen at home flutter their wings to keep their balance on a rocky edge. I hear them shriek, like the shriek of the hurricane blowing in from the ocean, or the howl of wolves in the village night, or the cries of genies from the river depths.

Memories come and go with the tread of my feet as I walk through the forest. They take me back home to my city, Cairo. I can see my friends. They are no longer images in my memory, or names in my diary. They move, they speak, they laugh. I have restored them to life, like my friend Raga’a on the bank of the Nile. I know he is dead, but I take his arm and walk with him across Abbas Bridge in Giza. His shoulder keeps touching my shoulder. He sways a little as he walks, as though he has one leg shorter than the other, treads on the ground more heavily with his right foot. At that time I did not like his walk, but now it seems attractive, distinguishes him from other men, gives him something special. I can recognize him from a distance, from the way he walks, his well-ironed grey suit, his shoes shining despite the dusty roads. On holidays he was always fully dressed, never sat on stone benches near the Nile, never cracked melon seeds between his teeth, or ate green fava beans from their pods.

I liked to do all these things. I liked to sit on rocks jutting out into the sea, to receive the spray of the waves on my body, to be refreshed by the feeling of wet clothes clinging to my skin, to walk in the rain, let it drop on my hair and face. But he preferred to sit on a clean seat in a smart casino and look at the sea from a distance. These small faults spoilt our friendship, were irksome to me.

Now, as I walk through the forest, I realize suddenly that he is not with me, that I am alone. He died twelve years ago in October 1981. Four days before his death he sent me a letter from Paris. It lay for months on my desk with the rest of my mail. I was away from my home in Giza living in a cell in the women’s prison of Al-Kanatir, north of Cairo.

I walk out of the forest onto the road leading to the department in which I teach. In a few moments I will be in class giving my first lecture. I pull my arm away from Raga’a. We part but I do not say good-bye, for he will be there in my memory for me to bring back some other time. I look up at the campus trees, their branches resplendent with the colours of spring flowers. Sherif is hastening to class ahead of me. I can see him from behind wearing a brown pullover with small yellow triangles, and brown rubber-soled shoes. He carries a leather satchel and walks fast, his shoulders slightly bent. His hair is long, flying in the air like wings with a bald patch in the middle. His body is slim and taut as he presses forwards, his obstinate head ready to break through obstacles in his way, with the determination that took him through fourteen years of prison. Throughout the fourteen years spent in the prisons of Egypt he did not change. His will remained the same, his features remained the same. Maybe his bones became slightly more pronounced, his skin tanned dark brown by the desert sun. Maybe the silent man became more silent, his slim body slimmer from years with little food, tautened by the iron bars surrounding him. It was as though for him time had not counted, had just fallen away.

We met in the spring of 1964, a spring still hovering between the remains of winter clouds and the first scents of orange blossom. Neither of us believed in the marriage institution, in a marriage contract which sounded like the lease for a rented shop. But we lived in Cairo, the capital of Egypt, a country where man and woman cannot meet without the official seal, for without this seal the devil is their bedfellow whenever they embrace. Cairo (Al-Kahira) means the triumphant. But it is my oppressed city and ever since my childhood I have carried this feeling in my heart. It is a city that I love and hate. The moment I arrive there from a journey abroad, I want to leave again. The moment I am ready to depart, have climbed into the plane, fastened the seatbelt around my waist, I feel like jumping out and running back. It is a city that accompanies me day and night wherever I go, like the vivid remains of a dream. To me, it remains the nightmare of being hunted down, besieged, imprisoned, the pulsations of love, the pain of defeat, the exhilaration of resistance, the falling down then standing up again and again and again in a struggle that has no end. Cairo offers me a chalice of life and death from which I drink, and, every time I come back, I leave again with the intention never to return.

If there is such a thing as time then it is the time I create by writing. I bring back the things I lived in that city of mine, a city drowning in the mists, a city without time or place or geographical location. At a distance it appears to have no existence except in my imagination, as though life for me is beginning here and now, with the movement of the pen between my fingers, with the movement of the air in and out of my chest, and the movement of the hands around my watch. The present moment is the only reality in my life story. It is an infinite moment which stretches from birth to death, from the past after the past is no more, to the future which does not yet exist.

I stop writing for a moment. Through my window on the branch of a tree I can see a new-born squirrel basking in the sunshine. Suddenly a huge hawk pounces on it and starts to tear the small body into pieces, to devour it from head to tail. My eyes cannot pull themselves away from the sight of the killing, my head refuses to move. The small squirrel puts up a feeble, vain resistance, but the ferocity of the hawk leaves it no breathing space and in no time everything seems over as I sit there, my hands hanging helplessly on either side of my body, staring at the distant branch, listening to the sound of soft bones being crushed between the blades of the powerful beak, as though it were my bones that were being crushed, as though it were my body throbbing with warmth and life that was being devoured by the eagle, by that city of Cairo before I had the time to touch, to taste, to know and enjoy the full flavour of my life.

Like prophets and gods I reach for life after death by writing. I do not have the courage of my friend Raga’a who died without writing anything. ‘What use is writing, Nawal,’ he said to me, ‘if the censors delete what is most important?’ Raga’a was a poet whom I met for the first time in my clinic during the year 1959. I had opened this clinic in Giza Square at the beginning of 1958. My writer friends used to gather there in the evenings after I had finished work. He had written a poem about the union between Egypt and Syria and the censors had mauled it so badly that nothing was left except fragmented, distorted remains of the original text. Four days before he died he wrote me a few lines. In his letter he said: ‘I am writing to you from Paris where I have been able to settle at last. You are the only one I have continued to remember throughout this long exile. But how can I tell whether my love for you is a reality?’

Memories keep flitting through my mind as I stand in the classroom behind the table. Sherif has started to introduce the new course which we had decided to call ‘Dissidence and Creativity’. Today at this university of Duke we are beginning a new experience, that of being a husband and wife who at night sleep in the same room and who during the day teach in class together. Despite some moments of struggle between us, Sherif nevertheless is not a man bothered by his masculinity. The battle he has waged was not aimed at proving his sexual supremacy. From a very young age he had never stopped dreaming of changing the world. It was a dream that went through different phases of a struggle against capitalism for an ideal socialist system built on freedom, justice and love, the three things which brought us together more than thirty years ago.

My city Cairo stretches its body out under the morning sun, like a voluptuous belly dancer who has offered her nakedness to many eyes throughout the night, only to wake up chaste and pure with the rising sun, or like the wife of the ancient god Amoun, hiding behind a veil like the Virgin Mary as she looks down on the brown waters of the river Nile. Close to her rise the Pyramids of the Pharaohs on the sandhill of Giza, tombs of the gods who had ruled Egypt since the slave system started to prevail. They refused to step down from their throne after death. They discovered the afterworld so that they could continue to rule even after they had died, buried their belongings, their silver and gold, their sceptres and crowns, their food and even the hot dishes they liked with them. All these things were placed close to their dead bodies, together with fruit, sweets and carefully cut pieces of opium and hashish to ensure that they could cont...