A Much-Needed Voice of Resistance

It gives me great pleasure to honor Nawal El Saadawi, who has been such an inspiration and a role model in my life. My awareness of the numerous challenges that Arab women face grew from Nawal's prolific work.

I had left my country of birth—Lebanon—to escape the plight of my Arab sisters and to find out who I was away from the restrictions I had experienced as an adolescent. It was in the United States that I discovered Simone de Beauvoir, who opened my eyes to the plight of women all over the world. She inspired me to commit my research and writing to women's issues and more specifically to Arab women's problems. But it was Nawal El Saadawi who forced me to examine my own dilemmas and concerns. She was writing about the problems women in my part of the world were facing. Hers was the outspoken, eloquent voice of resistance I needed. It helped me address and analyze what had troubled me for so long that I needed to run away to discover it.

I didn't know it at the time, but when in 1972 I started writing my first novel, L'excisée, about the physical and metaphorical excision of women, Nawal was publishing Woman and Sex. She denounced genital mutilation (to which she had been subjected), polygamy, beatings, lack of freedom of all kinds. The book became a foundational text of second-wave feminism. Because of her revolutionary book and ideas, she was dismissed from her job at the Ministry of Health. Her book was banned, and she left Egypt for a while to come to Lebanon, where she worked at the UN Relief and Works Agency. Her books were reprinted and became best sellers throughout the Arab world.

When I began my career as a young professor at the University of Illinois, I included Nawal's books in my teaching. In 1983 I organized a conference on gender and Third World women at Illinois and invited Nawal to be the keynote speaker. She had just been released from prison and was suffering from back pain, but she gladly agreed to come and talk to us. Her amazing presence electrified us all, giving us that push to get more organized to bring on change. The event was my first encounter with her, the beginning of a long friendship in which we wrote each other to encourage each other when we were dispirited.

While she was still with us in Champaign, I interviewed her about excision. Here is an excerpt from that 1983 interview:

NES:

Clitoridectomy is still practiced in villages. In my village, where I go once a month, they still want all the girls to be excised. In cities, in Cairo, it's different.

EA:

Because of the law?

NES:

No, there's no law. There's something like a directive from the Ministry of Health that states that the circumcision of girls must not be practiced, while that of boys may be. But it's not enforced. Any doctor may practice excision, and no one will punish them. As for the daiahs, the village midwives, they are practicing excision night and day.

EA:

Have you asked women if it has deprived them of orgasm?

NES:

No, no! This is what the women in my village told me last month: young girls want excision! The daiah said to me: they run to me and ask me for it. Social pressure is great. I remember, however, when I was young, before they did it to me, I was waiting for it, I desired it. Not desire. . . . I think it was a particular experience that I had to acquire, something like a baptism. Something had to occur, to arrive in the world, just as the sun rises in the East and sets in the West. When it happened and I was healed, I was happy to overcome this trial. I had taken the test, you understand, I had passed it with success.

EA:

When were you then conscious of what it was? What made you aware of it?

NES...