My experience with  writing and freedom  

by

Nawal El Saadawy

     From the moment  the world of writing opened itself before me, I started to follow a route which was drastically different from the one pre-ordained for me before birth. The history of enslavement dating back to Pharaonic times had not only laid out the path I should follow from cradle to grave but it had also created the authorities to make sure that I did. It thus provided the authority of the father and husband in the small family ,  the authority of the state, the legal system, the social institutions,the authority of religion and shari'a and finally the authority of international legitimacy.

      These authorities took  a pyramidical shape on top of which we find what we today call the New World Order, the New York Times and the CNN. At the bottom lie local governments, local television, prison, censorship and literary criticism.

     As a child I discovered that writing was the only means by which I could breathe. But the government, the  patriarchal and religious authories, the propaganda in the media as well as the teachings of the Faculty  of Medicine (which I joined to please my father),  all said to me, "There is no connection between writing and the act of breathing in a woman" . But my life experience has confirmed the very close connection  between writing and the entry of air into my lungs. These hierarchical authories joined forces and, like an iron fist , pushed me into the conjugal bed, under  the illusion of love and the scientific (Freudian) idea that women created babies and not ideas. At one stage of my life I produced babies and more than once in my life I was married to the brim. And yet, instead of feeling the air entering my lungs, I felt suffocated.

     The more the woman dedicates herself to the institution of marriage the more suffocated she is bound to feel. I looked up the word "dedication" in the inherited dictionary of enslavement and I found it connected with the devotion of the slaves to their masters. It's a term which implies the act of getting lost in others,of self-denial and self-sacrifice, terms which come uner the category of death or of self-destruction.

     But creativity and writing are quite the other end of the spectrum. They involve keeping the self alive rather than destroying it. They mean the realization of self and not its denial.

     And thus I discovered the contradiction between marital devotion and self-fulfilment  in a woman's life since marriage dictates that a woman's identity dissolve in that of her husband or in those of her children (after all, the children are the rightful ownership of the husband and his name is written on them). Thus  the man of letters is blessed with a wife who cooks his food, washes his trousers and offers him tea while he sits to write down the story of his love for another woman. On the other hand, the woman of letters is blessed with a husband who turns her life into misery and scolds her all the time for having neglected to cook, wash or sweep the floors or for having left the  children scream out loud while he slept. The  creative man has a wife who delights in his success and feels all the happier the more successful he becomes. The creative woman has a husband who gets depressed when she succeeds and gets increasingly more depressed the more successful she becomes.

     The creative woman, with a little audacity involving the denial of part of the crust of her brain, may save herself from the depression of husbands and may succeed in avoiding to lose herself in the sacred kingdom or the woman's kingdom inside the house. She may go out on the streets  demonstrating with others and shouting: God . . . nation . . .and king (or whoever occupies the position of a king). She may then  find herself required to lose herself in the royal self or the presidential self. If she cannot do that, however, a huge wooden gate will open up before her leading her into prison.

     While in prison in 1981 I tried day and night to discover the crime I had committed, never having been affiliated  to any political party, never having committed adultery, never having carried an illegitimate child and never having insulted anyone. After eighty days and nights in my cell I discovered that my only crime was having been unable to lose myself in the self of the president. In Ancient Egypt, the Pharaoh considered himself divine and all other selves were required to dissolve completely in his. Losing oneself has been  the virtue most highly appreciated from the days of the Pharaohs until now. But dissolving is the opposite of creativity. Writing means expressing my Self. It means that my Self will not dissolve in any other Self, be it my husband's, God's or the President's.

     Writing means surviving and denying death. If it had not been for writing, all prophets, gods and pharaohs would have disappeared forever. If it had not been for the discovery of printing, we would not have  known anything about those who had died. But for  the Torah, the Bible and the Koran, we would not have had Moses, Essa or Mohammed.

     Writing has the power of giving life to the dead. This is how writing has become for me the only way I can survive. I often wonder how people who do not write manage to survive or endure life. My mother died leaving not trace. I am one of the nine children she gave birth to. None of us carried her name. My father also died leaving behind no mark except for his name in mine written on my books. With the translation of my books into several languages, my father's name has become known while my mother's has gone forever.

     However, I feel better off than the English writer Virginia Woolf who took on her husband's name "Woolf" and was known by it. A woman should use her own name on her works and not that of her father or husband. If I had to choose between my father's name and my husband's, I would certainly prefer my father's since it is at least permanent. The husband's name may change with the change of circumstances. This is particularly true in our country. When a husband happens to fall in for another woman, all he would need do is just open his mouth and  utter the words "You're divorced" three times. Upon which the wife packs her bags and leaves. In the eye of the law and the shari'a, she has become a divorced woman.

     I consider myself lucky that I had never taken the name of any husband of mine and never signed on my books except with my father's  name and that of my paternal grandfather's "El Saadawy", the name of a man who is a total stranger to me since he had died before I was born. He died of Belherzia, poverty and enslavement, the triple chronic disease afflicting our peasants from the days of the Pharaohs until the present.

     There are times when my name is shortened to my Grandfather's name "El Saadawy". This is how this strange man gets his name imprinted on me and on the covers of my books.

     Nothing consoles me better than the thought that at least on Doomsday I will be able  to shed that strange name and carry my mother's. When I was a little girl, my father once told me that on Doomsday people would be called by their mothers' names. I asked him why this was so and he said that maternity was certain. So I asked ,"Is paternity not certain. then?"

     I saw the pupil of his eye quiver slightly and a long silence followed. He gave my mother a look wavering between doubt and certainty.

     My mother had not known any man other than my father. How could she have done if she was never out of the house or, more precisely, never out of the kitchen? After giving birth to her ninth child, she got pregnant with the tenth. She had an abortion.

     One day while she slept, she dreamt of my father with another woman. Her grief made the milk freeze  in her breast forming a cancerous tumour. She died very young. My maternal grandmother used to sing to herself in the bathroom a song which went "Trusting a man is like trusting that water would stay in a sieve". She used to pour water over the sieve and saw it disappear to the last drop. She would smack her lips in distress. When her husband came home late at night, she would smell the other woman in his underwear. In the morning he gave her a speech  on the love of one's country.

     After the death of my Grandfather, I became very sceptical of any man who chanted the song of patriotism.When he went from the love of the Motherland to the love of the peasants or labourers, my suspicions increased. If he went beyond that and held a rosary in his hand, my scepticism  was confirmed beyond doubt.

        Now whenever I met a man who was full of religious words and cliches and who held the rosary in his hand, I would immediately smell a rat. If this man happened to be the head of the state, the problem went from the domain of the personal to the public. And if he happened to be my husband, the disaster would be unmitigated because I would then have to choose between writing and living in the Gardens of Eden.

     I have always chosen writing, Eden being rather out of  reach and its delights designed for the gratification of men. Prominent among these delights is the presence of fair, young virgins. But I am a woman of a dark skin. I have long lost my virginity and am at the moment at the menopausal phase (to use the language of the system). In Paradise a woman like  myself will have none other than her husband. What a disaster! To  have my husband chasing me in life and after death!

     That is why I have always chosen writing. I came to realize even as a child that I was not to to have the  fate of my mother, my Grandmother or, for that matter, of any other woman. Why I had this conviction is not totally clear to me. One reason may have been that I saw my father's great admiration of the Prophet and I wanted to get my father's admiration. One day I dreamt I became a prophet and my father looked at me admiringly. When in the morning I told my Grandmother about that dream, she just hit her chest in disbelief. She heated some water for me to cleanse myself of the guilt. A woman could never be a prophet, she told me.

     That day I took up my pen and jotted down angry words on the page. My brother who failed his exams every year could become a prophet while I, who succeeded every year, could not.

     My anger was directed at a power I did not know.  My Grandmother said it was God who preferred my brother though he failed his exams every year.

     There is certainly a connection between creativity and anger. The little girl is taught to conceal her anger and draw an angelic smile on her face. But no connection exists between angels and creativity. That is why in Arabic we have in the expression "the devil of poetry" and "the devil of art".

     I began to voice my anger against all authorities from the bottom up, starting with the authority of my father.

     My father noticing a frown rather than a smile on my face told me that frowning made girls lose their femininity. So I had to choose between femininity and writing. I opted for the latter.

     In the dead of the night I hugged my anger the way the woman carrying an illegitimate child hugged her secret. I told my mother that if a woman did not get angry at injustice she would not be human. She told me, being human was better than being a woman. My Grandmother raised her hand to the chin  and said challengingly: "I bet you won't find anyone to marry you. Obeying your father is obeying God".

     In obedience to  my father I joined the Faculty of Medicine and put on the angelic white coat. For years I lived with the stool and urine of patients, the rules of the Ministry of Health and the instructions of the General Director and the Minister.

     When my father died, I was free of my promise and started to live to please no one but myself.

     Creativity only begins when man is free from the wish to please others.

     After my father's death I discovered that there were other authorities trying to dominate my life. But I promised myself that no one would have domination over me and that I would write what my own mind dictated.

     So the soldiers knocked on my door, broke it open and dragged me to prison under the pretence of ensuring my safety. I walked into prison as if into a dream. The trance was not unlike the one I had when, under the illusion of love and the marriage bond, I walked back into my second marriage.

     The authority of the state and the authority of the husband constitute one iron chain whose arch enemy is writing. My husband used to fly into a mad rage whenever he saw me with pen and paper in hand.

     The jailer came every day into my cell, turned it upside down,  removed the tiles under the toilet, dug deep into the floor and wall and screamed out loud: "If I found any pen or paper, it would be far more dangerous for you than finding a gun".

     After the death of the president, I walked out of jail  and into a prison-like existence. My name moved from the black list to the grey list, the only difference between the two being the colour of paper. I saw people's faces pale and sallow. Nobody believed anybody and everyone accused the other. Accusations flew downwards and upwards, from the tip of the pyramid where international legitimacy resides to the bottom, to local governments, patriarchal and legislative authorities, to religious institutions,  cultural institutions, the media, the press, the intellectuals, the writers and the literary critics.

     Everything seemed to be in a recession.

     Even the loaf of bread, like justice, was in short supply. I realized that writing was the substitute for justice, and justice was beauty and love.

-- Writing is the vain attempt to find love.

-- Writing is the vain attempt to defy death.

-- Both love and death are ephemeral.

-- Nothing remains but the letters on the page.

-- Nothing remains of gods and prophets except the books.

     Without the presence of creative art to create hope from nothingness, all around us would be pure despair. Creativity is like a spot of light in pitch darkness. It is this ray of light in the midst of this massive despair which makes our suffering in writing worth while.

     We pay a  high price for being  creative,  a price which may be as high as death. If the creative artist happens to be a woman, the price she pays is doubled, tripled or even quadrupled, according to circumstances.

     In addition to losing Eden, I have also lost in my life what my  Grandmother used to call "the shade of a man", the shade provided by a man being, as the saying goes, "better than the shade of a wall". Personally, I have always preferred the shade of the wall to that of a man who got depressed because of my creativity. This was how I lost my reputation on the personal as well as on the public levels.

     The men who tried to flirt with me but found  me unyielding called me an unfeminine man-hater. The men who worked for God, the nation and for the oil kings said that I worked for the Devil and that I was advocating permissiveness and sexual freedom. The men who loved peasants and workers said that I loved women better than peasants or workers, that I believed more in sexual freedom than in class struggle. I was therefore the ally of imperialism and zionism. The men who loved the nation for its own sake and did not savour any talk of class struggle said I was the ally of international communism because the the word "class" is sometimes used in my writings.

     My doctor colleagues who hated any talk about politics and loved nothing better than their patients (men and women alike) thought I was an utter failiure having achieved none of the five goals of the profession: a clinic, a car, a house, a  farm  and a bride (or bridegroom).

     As for my literary colleagues of both sexes who love to be in the limelight of the screen, the newspapers or the state prizes and who consider that one could criticize anything or anyone under the sun except God and the head of state, these believe I have failed in my literary career because I live away from the spotlight in the area of the grey or black lists.

     More than ten years ago, in 1980, one of my books fell by chance into the hands of a small publisher living in South Africa. Although he was white, he fought alongside the black Africans against the racist regime of Apartheid. He was harassed and was in danger of getting killed in Johannesburg but he managed to escape to London and started this small publishing business.

     This was the first book of mine to be translated into a foreign language. With it I stepped out of local bounds to English readership. And then to different languages.

     From 1980 till now in 1992 sixteen of my works, including novels, short stories and scientific studies, have been published. My books are now read everywhere in the world.

     This is how I escaped local confines.

     In 1987, after the publication of my Novel The Downfall of the Imam in Arabic, the telephone rang at home. The voice of an official from the Ministry of the Interior told me that I was going to be put under constant guard.

     "What for?" I asked in surprise.

     "To guard your life", he said.

     "My life?" I asked.

     ""Yes. Your life is under threat."

     "Who's threatening it?" I asked.

     "This is all the information I have. We'll send the guards in an hour", he said.

     "I don't want any guards", I told him, "as long as you withhold information from me".

     "We'll send you the guards all the same, with or without your consent", he said.

     "Will you protect my life against my wish?" I asked.

     "Yes", he said, "your life is not yours. It's the state's".

     The guards came to my house and stayed there for two years. Then  they disappeared. Until this day I have no idea why they came in the first place or why they left later. But I came to understand that my life was not mine.

     In 1990 a journalist came along with the copy of an Arabic  magazine published in London. In it was a list of "the dead"( or those who ought to be dead). I read my my name on that list together with the names of several literary figures, writers and poets.

     "Who made this list?" I asked.

     "The oil kings", was the answer.

     At night while in bed I saw a small butterfly, almost spider-like, getting attracted by the light of the lamp. When it came too  close it got scorched by the heat and so withdrew little. This movement was repeated several times until finally it got itself burnt and fell down dead.

     I wondered while asleep about this irrational attraction to the light and the flame.

     In the morning, opening the magazine, I realized the connection between the oil kings and international legitimacy. In the magazine was written that the oil kings had paid the Western alliance the cost of the Gulf War.

     For the first time in history the slaves are paying their masters the cost of their own enslavement.

     Things being what they are, isn't the connection between creativity and death more reasonable than the attraction between the butterflies and the light? And since creativity was up against all the pyramidical authories, both internally and externally isn't it logical then that the creative artist is threatened with imprisonment or death? All the more so if that artist happened to be a woman?

     Trom the the dawn of the history of enslavement and the rise of the patriarchal class system, there has always been a conflict between creativity and authority.

     This is why restrictions are imposed on free expression. Every creative artist, male or female, has a personal way of surmounting these limitations. But simple, clear and direct  writing remains the most dangerous since it conveys its message directly to thousands or millions who may be incapable of deciphering the more intricate literary discourse

            But the creative idea imposes its own method of expression. In some of my works symbolism and suggestiveness gain ground over directness. AT times I leave meanings to be read between the lines. At others I leave spaces or even dots. I may let  out an unuttered sigh that ends up in silence or a full stop.The creative reader has the task of reading the unwritten script within the the written book.

            When I am  overwhelmed by mad courage, I write without caution. But what I write no one will dare publish. I put these in a blue file on which is written “To be published posthumously”. These are the writings I manage to produce away from the inner censor. This censor may hide himself behind a military outfit and may carry in hand the  sceptre of kings or presidents.

            At other times, he may wear the body of my grandfather who had died before I was born. Or he may take  off this body, disappearing without a trace except for a small delicate cane like  the  one that the teacher of Religious Instruction at primary school used to carry in his hand.  

            The censor is ever present,  always looking at you as though through a spy-hole. There is always a price to pay for creativity, a price which may be life itself.

            But for me it is a small price to pay because I would rather lose life than lose myself.  Without this self, creativity can never be.

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Published in Fusul, January 1993