La Vie en Rouge

I met her through her writing, so powerful and impassioned a plea for truth and justice that I had not come across before. I was thrilled by the intimacy of her thoughts, marveling at her unflinching depiction of female oppression in a society dominated by corrupt men. She also powerfully delineated the subversive space inhabited by her heroines, such as Firdaus. Where had I seen those eyes before? How did I know that pain and passion? Why did the world of Woman at Point Zero feel like a familiar yet strangely distant dream? My world was not that world, after all. I was born into a middle-class, urban, educated Pakistani Muslim family—a far cry from a women's prison in Egypt.

My quest for answers led me, several decades ago, to track Nawal's whereabouts and wait for the perfect opportunity to present itself—which it did, to my great delight. Fall had given way to winter, there had been an icy drizzle earlier in the day, and I knew that the drive into Manhattan would not be an easy one from my home in upstate New York. Nevertheless, I was determined. The writer whose novels I had been incorporating into my courses for a while was going to be in town. She was to give a lecture at a famous underground haunt favored by leftist intellectuals and activists, named for Bertolt Brecht. This was not a chance I could pass up—a meeting with my idol!

The room was packed. No number of photographs I'd seen on book covers could have prepared me for the shock of her presence. The shoulder-length white halo of hair, dazzling, daring the audience with its wildly obscene purity framing a wheatberry-complexioned face, its darkness accentuated by the contrasting hair, with not a spot of makeup, the wrinkles around the laughing eyes and wide mouth like lines in freshly damp earth. But what took my breath away were her eyes, dark circles surrounded by rings of white, a magnetic force field that held us all captive to their gaze. . . .The singsong quality of her voice, the guttural intonation of an Arabic-inflected English, the disarming candor of barbed words made palatable by a wicked smile . . . I lapped it all up.

Yet not everything she said made sense to me. Here was a woman who had written of the horror of being awakened in the middle of the night at the tender age of six or seven years, dragged off to the bathroom by her mother and another woman to be "circumcised," saying that orgasm for a woman is a mental thing and therefore that having a mutilated clitoris does not necessarily prevent a woman's experience of sexual pleasure. Why was she diminishing the painful experience here? She then compared female clitoridectomy to male circumcision—a parallel that further reduced the harmful effects of FGM on women by refusing to see it as sui generis. When I questioned her, she answered that female orgasm is as much a psychological as a physiological phenomenon—something Freud had never understood. That gave me pause, and I only later grasped her comments as a challenge to imperialist feminists who see Muslim and non-Western women as extreme others, always victims of culture rather than of a global class patriarchal system.

From that first meeting there was no looking back, with our bond growing ever stronger over the decades. In 2000 Nawal accepted a one-year creative writer-in-residence position I arranged for her at my university, Montclair State. At a public talk she asked the audience, which comprised many students representing the Muslim Student Association on campus, to ponder why the veiling of women, a pre-Islamic practice, had been wrongly declared an Islamic injunction. This resulted in an immediate uproar, so what did she do? Smiling, she walked to one of the angriest members of the audience, who was insisting that she was wrong and that God demands that women of the Ummah be veiled. Nawal bent down to the young man and quietly but clearly asked, "Did God...