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G&S Typesetters PDF proof C H A P T E R E I G H T Nawal el-Saadawi Introduction Chapter 6 looked at three anthologies of interviews with Arab women whose stories and voices were heavily determined by the textualization of their spoken words carried out by the editors, who were themselves the interviewers. Chapter 7 discussed a written autobiographical text by an Arab woman and an extract from it translated, edited, shaped, and presented to western readers by a western writer. This chapter examines various modes of writing in which different rhetorical devices for saying “I” are used by one Arab writer, Nawal el-Saadawi.1 I am dedicating a long chapter to this one writer for many reasons. First, Saadawi is one of the most prolific feminist writers in twentieth-century Arab countries. She has published books on a wide range of topics relating to contemporary problems of Arab societies. She has also tried various forms of writing such as short stories, novels, plays, and essays in order to express her vast range of ideas. Second, she is almost the first Arab woman to raise the issue of sexual oppression publicly in a daring manner; before her, only forms ofsocial,economic,andpoliticaloppressionwerediscussedbyArabfeminists. Third, she is a very controversial writer, having been fiercely attacked by critics and her writings having been banned by some Arab regimes. Finally, she has become one of the best-known Arab women writers in the world, for her works have been translated into English, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Greek, Portuguese, Urdu, and Persian. It is useful, first, briefly to lay out Saadawi’s social, educational, and professional background, for her writings and her position as an international figure are very much influenced by it. Nawal el-Saadawi was born in 1931 in a little village (Kafr Tahla) in the Egyptian delta but was brought up in the biggest Egyptian city (Cairo) by “parents of two different classes.”2 Her father was an only son to his poor mother, who sacrificed for his education while not being able to do the same for her daughters. Saadawi has frequently referred to her grandmother, whom she admired and whom she thought of 131 08-T2696 8/14/03 5:16 PM Page 131 G&S Typesetters PDF proof as “Isis, the Egyptian goddess of knowledge . . . and Eve, who in mythology came from the tree of knowledge.”3 As a university graduate, her father married a Cairene upper-class woman, Saadawi’s mother, who as the daughter of the director-general of army recruitment was educated in French schools.4 Saadawi is always proud to announce that she was brought up in an atmosphere which encouraged education and knowledge.5 She particularly expresses her gratitude to her father for giving her some kind of freedom and for encouraging her education. Saadawi’s acknowledgment of her father rather than her mother is not so much a sign of sexual discrimination as it is a sign of alliance with working-class positions. Since she was a child, Saadawi had always been conscious of the class division in her society, echoed in her own family, because they were poor village people, according to her.6 Her sympathy, then, was directed toward her paternal relatives represented by her father, whom she refers to more than to her mother. Her class-consciousness, as well as her gender-consciousness, is present in all her writing. Saadawi’s gender-consciousness is also linked to a major theme in her writing and in her life: the tension between art and science. She claims that she always loved literature and writing but was also good at science. When she finished school she was torn between studying literature or doing science. She chose to do medicine because the “Faculty of Medicine took the best students , those with highest grades”;7 she became a doctor in 1955. The conflict between art and science, a theme which recurs in Saadawi’s interviews and writings, is an issue for many educated Arab women. In some Arab countries even today, women have to fight the basic battle to prove that they can be just as clever as men can be. Alongside her profession as a general practitioner, and then as a psychiatrist, Saadawi has also written and published prolifically, thus combining the love of both art and science in a dialectical way. On the one hand, her medical profession has given her a lot of...

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