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When the author Nawal El Saadawi was young, she fought for the right to not be married off at 10, to go to school, to finish school and go to college, to become a doctor and to divorce two husbands. In Egypt in the 1940s and '50s, these were gutsy steps for a woman to take, but in hindsight the most radical thing she ever did was to become a writer.
It isn't so much that she writes, it's what she writes about. She's tackled, among other topics, clitoridectomy - one of "the whole range of cruel and ingenious devices used to keep [women's] sexuality in check and limit her sexual relations to one man who had to be her husband";Arab society - "I personally have met many men who have higher degrees or have pursued their studies abroad and travelled widely, yet their emotional and mental constitution remains rigid and backward insofar as women are concerned"; and hardline Islamists - "[They] are busily engaged in ... spreading false notions about and advocating false solutions to the problems of Arab countries."
In fact, there's hardly a system or group she's left standing. Capitalism? A form of economic rape. Socialism? Better than capitalism but largely ignores gender issues. The West and Israel? Creeping imperialists. Fellow writers? Mostly tame and domesticated, shirkers of their political responsibility.
El Saadawi's scorched-earth views have, predictably, irked the powers that be in her native Egypt. Several of her 30 books and plays are banned, she's been imprisoned once, forced to leave the country under a death threat, and accused in court of being an enemy of Islam.
Comentators elsewhere have also been unsympathetic. Professor Magda Al-Nowaihi, an Arab studies professor at Columbia University, writing about why El Saadawi is one of the few Arab writers known to Westerners, concluded that it was largely because she confirms "certain stereotypes the West holds of the Arab world, particularly in terms of its treatment of women".
Well, what's a little criticism when you've already experienced jail and exile? "There is always a danger of being misinterpreted, but I don't care about the danger," the author counters. "I have to be honest with my ideas. If some people twist them, it's not my problem."
Less formidable in person than she appears on paper, 71-year-old El Saadawi has a vigorous head of white bobbed hair and a lively smile; her directness is offset by warmth. In Australia recently to promote her two-part autobiography, A Daughter of Isis and Walking Through Fire, she enthuses about the winter sunshine, the beaches, life in general and especially her third husband and fellow dissident, Sherif Hetata, who is with her.
Though they've been married since 1964 and have a grown-up son, Atef, they exhibit the tenderness of newlyweds. It's a closeness forged by their similarities - Hetata, like El Saadawi, is hard to categorise as a political thinker -but also presumably by the hardships their relationship has endured.
Hetata spent 14 years in prison for his opposition to the autocratic governments of the time. On his release in 1963, he went back to work as a doctor at Cairo's Ministry of Health, where he met El Saadawi and was immediately struck by her. "She was different from other people and I suppose I was different," he says. "We were both marginal to the bureaucratic, civil servant society that existed."
They agreed to marry because living together in Egypt at that time would have been too difficult. Even so, two years ago the religious authorities, outraged by what they saw as public criticism of Islam by El Saadawi, declared her an infidel and tried to have their marriage nullified, arguing that as a non-Mushm she could not be married to a Muslim. The ensuing court case, which the couple won, triggered an international campaign in their favour and was made into a BBC film called No Compromise.
Hetata admits that he was a bit frightened by the vehemence of the campaign against them, but El Saadawi, with what seems characteristic cool, dismisses the whole thing as nonsense.
When the accusations surfaced, she was overseas on a lecture tour and Hetara, back in Cairo, advised her not to come home for a while. She considered it and decided that after several decades of fighting battles, she could withstand one more: "If I stayed away they would say I ran away." Would the consequences have been seriousd? In other Arab countries, she notes, she could have been killed, but Egypt is a relatively tolerant society. What if they had lost the case? A shrug. "So what. We would have just gone back home and lived as we were and they could do what they liked".
It takes a big life to fill two volumes of autobiography and, on that count, El Saadawi qualifies.Born into a middle-class family in an Egyptian village, she was rudely introduced to her place in the world when the midwife attempted to drown her at birth for not being a boy. The oldest girl in a family of nine, she was sporty, curious and academically precocious, but her successes at school only highlighted the failures of her older brother and were received without comment'
In A Daughter of Isis, El Saadawi draws a sharp contrast between her inner life and the outer reality. At six, as she dreamed about being a mythical warrior goddess, the women of her famjily were arranging for her to have a clitoidectomy. when she passed her primary school with distinction, her grandmother's response was to measure her budding breasts and declare that she had better marry before she became a barren old spinster. At 10, she received her first suitor, a much older man she had never previously met. To prepare for his viewing of her, she was stripped of all body hair, heavily made-up and dressed in a gown and high heels. But rebellion wasn't far from the surface; when the man came to call on her at home, she blackened her teeth with eggplant and bared them at him when her father wasn't looking. Fate helped her go one step further - one of her high heels caught in a hole in the living-room carpet and she tripped, spilling the hot coffee she had been sent to serve him into his lap.
"This catastrophe lasted for several weeks," she writes. "One of its consequences was a sound thrashing, but this was not something that bothered me much. What mattered was that my bridegroom had disappeared like a wispy summer cloud in the wind."
Other would-be grooms also came and went scared away, she muses, by a combination of factors: "my dark complexion, the signs of poverty in our family, my tall stature, my big mouth, my protruding front teeth and my developed muscles, undesirable in a fernale body". She's being hard on herself, youthful photos show her to be an arresting woman. Its more likely the suitors sensed in her something undomesticated and decided to take their chances elsewhere.
        From where she stands now, her disregard for convention makes perfect sense, but I wonder what gave her such confidence back then to attempt a life on her own terms? She comes back to the question several times during the course of the interview. I was the oldest daughter, it came from having to compete with my brother ... I always had to fight for space.',
There was subtle encouragement from her parents, particularly her mother who, she says, was clever and ambitious but lived a life of stifling tradition. "My mother lived in the house; she would visit relatives maybe three times a year but she had no friends of her own, she had no life, so she felt very frustrated. She often spoke of marriage as something which limited women. "
And yet, as she points out, her sisters, though they have careers, have all made safe, prosperous marriages and even wear the veil something El Saadawi has refused to do. "My father never veiled his daughters; why should I veil myself after that? 'Why was I different?
My life was different. I was was exposed to many cultures;my        profession as a doctor put me in
touch with many people, and their hardships helped open my eyes and my mind. My sisters are not convinced of this or, even if they are, they wear the veil because it is pragmatic. But they also back me when I speak."
In the end, it seems she chose the less travelled road because nothing else made sense, In her books, she alludes to a "false self", which she adopted at various times only to shrug off its restrictions soon afterwards. As an adult, her "false self" married a dull and wealthy judge, but as a young woman, it was manifest in a whole range of things.
For a start, there was religion. As a child, she began to question her Muslim faith.
"Somehow I always doubted because of all the social injustice I saw," she says. "But then I would feel guilty, so I prayed, "Dear God, Please forgive me but I don't think I can believe in you.' Can you imagine!" She hoots with laughter at this image of the well-mannered radical. Then there was her growing political consciousness: British-occupied Egypt was undergoing intense ferment both about what sort of society it would be after independence and about its entrenched class system. El Saadawi's own family came from the ruling class on her mother's side and peasant stock on her father's: instinctively she sided with the
poorer side of the family. It's telling that at age 10 she began to keep a secret diary - the things inside her head were probably too strange to say out loud.
At medical college she attended political meetings, trying to work out who, among the many student radicals present, spoke for her. It was at one of these meetings that she met her first husband, Ahmed Helmi, a student doctor, nationalist and guerilla fighter.
She was attracted by his commitment to ideals; where the other student leaders had their eye on well-funded political careers, Helmi went off to fight against the British troops in the Canal Zone. From the perspective of both their marriage and his future, it was a disaster: he came back a lost man, and an increasingly bitter one when he realised his government disowned the guerilla fighters. Taking refuge in drugs, he became violent and moody and jealous of his wife. At one point, he attempted to kill her. It was an ugly end to what she maintains was the big love of her life.
It was difficult for a woman to get a divorce under Islamic law but not impossible; with the help of her father, who had studied Sharia law and knew its loopholes, she was eventually able to divorce Helmi and take their daughter, Mona, with her to live in the countryside.
Though she chose to be a doctor by profession, El Saadawi says she often wished for an alternative career in the arts or in literature. But her writing and beliefs may not have had such power if she hadn't spent time in the clinics, witnessing how ordinary society operated. Her time as a village doctor in the late 1950s is a case in point: here was a brutal introduction to the lives of the rural poor, with women forming the bottom of the heap.
In Walking Through Fire, she recalls trying to treat girls who had been given clitoridectornies with unsterilised razors (with dust used to stop the bleeding) and forcibly deflowered by village midwives. She had to struggle to teach basic hygiene to people who thought infections were a sign the gods were angry with them. In one haunting episode, she relates how one of her patients, a young girl, was rumoured to be possessed by the devil. After spending a lot of time with the girl, El Saadawi worked out that her trance-like state was, in fact, severe trauma: she had been repeatedly raped and beaten by her husband. In trying to shield her from more hurt, the doctor found herself the target of the local authorities, who said she was inciting women to disobey divine laws. She felt helpless; the girl's husband forced her to return home and days later her body was found in a river - she had committed suicide. El Saadawi was ordered back to Cairo by the Mnistry of Health soon after, to work in the hospitals there. Earlier, she had put what was too difficult to talk about into a diary - now she began writing for the same reason. What had been a random collection of thoughts about social and political injustices became short stories and plays and magazine articles. The death of her mother, for example, prompted her to quesnion why the Koran spoke only about men's rewards in heaven - she wrote a story about a faithful, woman who arrives in paradise to find her husband in bed with virgins. The story didn't find a publisher but others did, pieces connecting the twin yokes of class and sex, domestic rape and economic rape by the World Bank; domestic tyranny and US and Israeli imperialism in the Arab region.
She says she never contemplated writing just for writing's sake. In fact, she is contemptuous of Arab writers who she thinks have done so. Of Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, she says dismissively, "He's an Establishment writer. I cannot separate literature from politics. You cannot say that writers live on an isolated planet - writing is not decoration, it's part of life."
For her, writing has been worth risking death for, and, at one stage, almost worth killing for When she married for a second time, it was to a rich judge who, she realised, expected her to lead the life of a wealthy lady of leisure. The marriage began to unravel almost immediately, but the problems really came to a head when he tried to stop her writing. "He said the other judges were critical of what I wrote and it embarrassed him," she says. "He had been very liberal when we met but then he changed, I was revolted by him." There was no-one to help her escape this time - her father had died and her judge husband, who knew more about the Sharia law than she did, refused to give her a divorce. One night, during an argument, she pulled a scalpel from her medical bag and held it above his head. Would she have killed him? I don't know," she says now. "I was desperate, and I think he could see that, so he backed off and agreed to a separation."
To be a twice-divorced woman was not easy, she says, but she was protected to a degree by her position in society. "If you are a poor woman twice divorced, you will have a lot of problems. But in Egypt, when women are successful, it's like any country - people forget a little bit about their private life." Perhaps, but there were still people who openly disapproved of her; her writing began attracting the attention of the country's censors. In 1969, with the publication of her first non-fiction book, Woman and Sex, she became the first Arab woman to write about sex and its link to economics and politics - and response was not long coming. Though she had risen to become Egypt's director of public health, she was dismissed in 1972.
Journalist Geraldine Brooks, who covered the Middle East for six years, says El Saadawi has been "a thorn in the side of official Egypt, because her books are so widely read by Western feminists, human rights monitors and aid groups, who then demand a response to the issues she has raised". Of the impact she's had on Egyptian women, though, Brooks is less sure. "It's important to remember that illiteracy rates, especially for women and most particularly for the rural women who suffer most from practices such as female genital mutilation, remain obscenely high. Those women rely on their local imams for information about what their religion does or does not require, and those men are, in some cases, the very same men who have branded Nawal a heretic."
El Saadawi, who tends to be matterof-fact about her own misfortunes, will only say about the sacking and the censorship that it didn't put her off writing other militant books. She was both "aware and not aware of the consequences". Though she knew people who had been jailed for intellectual crimes, it didn't occur to her that she could become one of them. So it was a shock to her when, in 1981, she was sent to prison for three months, especially since Egypt was then parading as a democracy under Anwar Sadat.
She seems to have found the whole episode ridiculous. Was she tortured? "No, no," she says. "They were scared of me because I shouted that I would bum the jail down if they touched me." There was a trial, of sorts. "The judge told me I'd missed my appointment on the previous day. I asked him if he knew I was in jail. He said, 'I don't care, you missed the appointment.' It was rubbish."
The imprisonment had little effect: on her release, she and Sherif Hetata founded a political party, the Arab Women's Association, which among other things published a political magazine that was eventually closed by the government.
But a decade later, she received a more serious threat when her name appeared on the death list of a fundamentalist group. With security forces dogging her every move, she and Hetata decided it would be simpler to go into exile. For five years they lived in the US and she taught at Duke University in North Carolina.
She felt safe, but still at odds with the mainstream. There were the usual strains any cultural outsider feels, but there were also her mixed feelings about the US and the reception she received there. "People who attack only Islam are very much welcomed in the West," she says. "But people like me, who are also critical of the West, of the US government, of Israel and Zionism - I found it very hard, except in progressive circles." She hated the "double standards" of the US media. "Of course there are people there who are against Israeli terrorism, but I felt very angry at the way the media portray all Arabs as terrorists and suicide bombers and then Ariel Sharon as a man of peace. The real terrorists are state-sponsored, not suicide bombers who are, to me, freedom fighters."
Ironically, the enemy she had fled -censorship - was as present in America as in Egypt. Interviews she gave, to The New York Times and other newspapers, were always edited, and as the Arab studies professor Magda Al-Nowaihi points out, where the Arabic edition of El Saadawi's 1980 book, The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World, begins with a screed against Western imperialism, the English-language version simply starts with a diatribe against clitoridectomY- "Not an innocent change," Al-Nowaihi notes, "and not one without implications."
        After five years, El Saadawi went back to Egypt with Hetata. As a writer, she felt an overwhelming need to speak and write in her own language. It's home, however dangerous: "I prefer to be shot on the streets of Cairo than be called an 'alien'."
        Another writer might have found it prudent to keep her head down, but a few years after resettling in Cairo, El Saadawi gave the interview which nearly led to her marriage being annulled.
She reiterated her view that the practices of veiling women, of polygamy and inequality of inheritance rights were out of step with the true spirit of Islam. She also took the authorities to task for endorsing "pagan" rituals like kissing the black stone in Mecca. She had said as much before, but the newspaper, looking for a bit of sensation, ran the interview prominently with a headline describing her as an atheist. Other papers took up the cry; she says drily that she was also called a communist and a Zionist.
  The Arab intelligentsia and the liberal press in Cairo were quiet about the ensuing court case, just as they had been about other cases concerning free speech.She and Hetata were supported by other writers and academics both from Egypt and around the world, but reports in the press in Cairo suggested their willingness to criticise their own class and country had alienated them from the majority.
One businesswoman, interviewed in The Cairo Times, said angrily that though she had never read any of El Saadawi's books, she knew her as a troublemaker who had sold out to the West.
  "You pay a high price for being a dissident writer," El Saadawi says, and she sounds a little weary when she says it. "Our life is not easy. We are not rich, we are always attacked, you have to live on your nerves. Writing is fighting. But this is what we chose."