The controversial Egyptian author Nawal el Saadawi

By Joseph Ngunjiri

The first thing you notice about Nawal El Saadawi is the shock of white hair on her head. Then you remember that she is Arab. Shouldn’t she be veiled? Her outwardly appearance is that of a frail old woman.

But looks can be deceiving. Beyond the softly, grandmotherly look lies a woman of steel, a radicalised feminist who will not embrace a tradition just because it is culturally and religiously acceptable. Yes, this 81-year-old woman has given successive regimes in Egypt sleepless nights. Anwar Sadat even had her arrested and imprisoned for publicly criticising his policies.

Such is the potency of her ideas that as late as 2008 she had to endure the ignominy of a contesting a case seeking to strip her of her Egyptian citizenship.

Book ban

The case, filed by a private lawyer, also sought to have the Egyptian Culture minister ban all her books. This was in response to her play God Resigns at the Summit Meeting. In this play, God is questioned by Jewish, Muslim and Christian prophets and finally quits.

El Saadawi, a trained physician, who at one time was Egypt’s director general of Public Health, lost her job in 1972, following the publication of her book Woman and Sex, which took a critical look at Female Genital Mutilation.

She has published over 45 novels, plays and collections of short stories, which have been translated into over 30 languages.

El Saadawi was in the country recently as an invited guest of the 2012 Kwani? Litfest, where she gave talks on varied subjects.

She is especially passionate about the issue of circumcision and does not hide her opposition to the practice, not only on women, but also on men.

“As a medical doctor I can tell you that it is harmful to cut any part of the child,” she told a rapt audience at the Hotel Intercontinental. She dismisses as ‘rubbish’ the current drive to have men circumcised on health grounds.

“We need to use our common sense, HIV/Aids has nothing to do with the foreskin,” she says. “This is the work of lazy scientists.”

She charges that the campaign for male circumcision is part of a Jewish propaganda coming from the West. “In the US, both the medical profession and politics are subordinate to the powerful Jewish lobby, which seeks to impose its culture,” she says.

Origins of FGM

El Saadawi gives fresh insights on the origins of FGM. She traces the practice to ancient Egypt, which used to be matrilineal. “In ancient Egypt fatherhood did not exist,” she explains. “Women were free to have multiple partners and thus is was difficult to know the fathers of children born as a result of such unions.”

But since men wanted to know who their children were, she adds that monogamy had to be enforced. “And the only way of enforcing it was through diminishing the sexuality of the woman, by cutting the only sexual organ in a woman; the clitoris,” she says.

El Saadawi, who herself underwent FGM at a tender age, dedicated 50 years of her life fighting the practice.

It is while working as a doctor that she realised the terrible physical damage FGM could cause. Her struggles bore fruit and a ban on female circumcision was finally instituted in 2008 in Egypt. The ban notwithstanding, FGM is still practised in Egypt, egged on by a section of religious leaders.

A battle-hardened feminist, El Saadawi believes there can never be equality without freedom, ‘just like there can never be freedom without equality.’ She adds that freedom comes with choice.

“The idea of freedom of choice is a big lie,” she says. “For example, women do not chose to be veiled, they do it out of social and religious pressure. Why are certain things forced on women and not on men?” Even in her old age El Saadawi has not stopped fighting for what she believes is just.

Tahrir square

During the Egyptian Uprising, which resulted in the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, she was right in the thick of things. “I was in Tahrir Square the whole time,” she says.

She, however, insists that the Tahrir revolution did not achieve its desired objectives, and that explains why the masses are back at the square protesting against Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood.

“The revolution was hijacked by the Egyptian army, fanatics and the US. By collaborating with the US, Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood are doing exactly what Mubarak used to do,” she says.

To Morsi and his backers, El Saadawi has a message: “Our revolution might be progressing in a zigzag manner but we will fight on. They cannot stop history; the future for our people is bright.”

El Saadawi, who teaches Creativity, Dissidence and Revolution in the US says Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o is her friend. “I always tell him to come back to Kenya and live with his people whenever we meet,” she says.

She insists that writers should be dissidents and thus should never be silent in the face of injustices.

“A writer should write about injustices, oppression and discrimination,” she says, “there is nothing like a neutral writer. Even in love there is politics. You cannot separate writing and fighting.”

And with a disarming smile, she adds that being imprisoned and being sent into exile is normal fare for a writer.