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The first glimpse I get of Nawal El Saadawi is when she stands on tiptoe to look through the glass porthole in the doors to Auditorium 1. Bright black eyes that don’t need companionship from a mouth to smile peer inquisitively into a room that’s already half full with an impressive mix of people – all ages, sexes, races, religions and hairdos.
Nawal El Saadawi was born in 1931 in rural Egypt, and trained as a doctor. She had always written, but in 1969 she wrote Women and Sex, a non-fiction work that openly addressed issues such as Female Genital Mutilation, the cult of virginity and honour, and the female sex drive. This lost her her position at Cairo hospital, and Health magazine, which she edited, was shut down. In 1981 she was sent to prison under an edict signed by President Sadat, which saw over 1000 intellectuals incarcerated.
From then on, El Saadawi’s publications, regardless of whether they are fact or fiction, have been censured by the Egyptian state: Woman at Point Zero, God Dies By The Nile, and The Hidden Face of Eve, republished by Zed Books, are all excellent examples of her incendiary prose and subject matter. Now 76, she has continued to live and struggle in Egypt, as have her husband and children. She has been repeatedly tried for apostasy, and even now awaits a verdict on the 4th of December, in a trial over her play God Resigns At The Summit Meeting (“I wrote a play – of course, it is very controversial.”). She faces a possible prison sentence.
All of which means that the woman who enters is even more impressive: short, with bright white hair sharp against the bright red shirt she wears, she stands gazing up at us from the pit of the stage while the organisers rush for a chair, looking thoroughly indomitable and pleased to be there. She settles into the conversation immediately, unabashed by her occasional misinterpretation of the questions – “I have the jetlag” – and enthusiastic in all she says. Asked about the frequent criticism that her work plays too easily with the line between fact and fiction, she laughs. Fact and fiction are two sides of the same thing, and she doesn’t know how you can assert that a work is completely one or the other. Equally, talking of the Iraq war and her most recent books, she points out that George W Bush is the political lovechild of Bush Senior’s stormy affair with Saddam Hussein, and that the war and the hanging of Hussein is the son’s crusade to kill the father.
The idea that things are decisively divisible comes from our “fragmented knowledge’: we are taught to accept that some things are political, some things medical, some things fiction, but in reality they are all linked. “Wherever you have two people you have politics. Two people in the bedroom are always political.” She is eager to mix up sex and politics, to show how much power, whether enforced by war against terrorism or clitoridectomy, has become intrinsic to both. If the words ‘capitalist patriarchy’ make you quiver for more, Nawal El Saadawi will have you on your knees.
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