A Tribute

I met Nawal in the late 1970s, when I began compiling my third anthology Sisterhood Is Global. Since Hoda Shaarawi and Inji Efflatoun (not to speak of Hatshepsut) had long departed, clearly the person to write the piece on Egypt was Nawal El Saadawi. She agreed, drafted the essay, gave it to her typist—and the next day was arrested by Anwar Sadat. Afraid that her typist would be implicated by being in possession of this "incendiary" article on women's rights, Nawal got a message to the typist to destroy the manuscript—the only copy. I learned this and then despaired on two counts, since I was very worried about her being in custody. My friend and colleague Gloria Steinem had recently been in Egypt as a tourist, but, being a celebrity, she had been invited to meet the folks in power (to whom neither Nawal nor I had ever deigned to stoop). So I leveraged Gloria, and on extension lines we phoned a number we thought might be for Madame Sadat's assistant. To our shock, she picked up the phone herself. We both immediately pleaded for Nawal's release, keeping politics at a diplomatic distance and citing Nawal's ill health. Madame Sadat apologized that she could do little or nothing, and we rang off. The next day Nawal was released and rewrote the entire piece. It still shines in the anthology.

Nawal and I became good friends during the ensuing decades, sometimes arguing over whether patriarchy or capitalism was most to blame for everything. Whenever she came to New York, we dined, laughed, cried, argued, agreed, and adored each other. When I went to Egypt—en route to Palestine to work with women there—I stayed with Nawal, both in Cairo and at her then-unfinished little country house on the Nile, where she even cooked for me. When we went for a walk, village women ran up to her, calling, "Dr. Nawal, Dr. Nawal!" She may have been a world-renowned figure, but to them she was simply the doctor who never failed to come to their aid: delivering this one's baby, setting that one's broken arm. We even played tourist for a few days in Cairo, riding camels (which I had never done—but neither had Nawal). It wasn't until I went to Egypt that I realized she inevitably argued the contrary side—fiercely defending feminism to Marxists, fiercely defending Marxism to me.

As the years passed, husbands came and went, but the politics continued and the friendship deepened—and when Tahrir Square blossomed in democracy, we phoned each other in delight. In fact, the last time I saw her was at a Women of the World conference, for which Nawal insisted I interview her because we always made good trouble together. We did. She was breathless with excitement about how young people had put her on a motorcycle and roared her around Tahrir Square, applauding, and about how she spent the night there, and how the future would now be different, totally transformed, and infinitely better. The planet is drearier without her. She radiated magnificence.