What befalls her next is said to be a fate of village children all across Egypt, and what strikes readers as starkly morose is the avenger of the family’s honor.Įl Saadawi never strays in her writing from the insistence that dichotomies merge. A young girl is sexually abused by a male relative and becomes pregnant. 1986) is the first-person, dreamlike account of a story touted to be true. The poignancy of betrayal is explored in this work, and both the reader and the central character come to learn that “things may seem to happen without reason, but sooner or later a reason becomes apparent.”
#BOOK THE HIDDEN FACE OF GOD PROFESSIONAL#
1991) features an illicit affair between a young professional woman and her writer lover who, as the story opens, has abandoned her. That women suffer in her works is a given, but an examination of the nature of the suffering is what is placed in the foreground. By turns, women are most easily marked as the target of such corruption and suffer immensely. 1985) is set in a small village on the banks of the Nile and explores the corruption of government officials who victimize the inhabitants of the small village. Unfortunately, readers tend to be trapped by the cultural practice of female genital cutting above all other issues presented in the work. It is believed to represent a microcosm of women throughout the Arab world. It became an instant sensation and continues to draw readers because it addresses the psychological and sexual problems of women and men she encountered during her medical practice largely in rural Egypt. The Hidden Face of Eve (first published in Arabic in 1977 and in English in 1980) is perhaps El Saadawi’s most well-known work apart from the novel Woman at Point Zero (1983). She insists that it is her job, as a writer, to expose the truth about cultural patrimony and religious fundamentalism. Having survived several repressive regimes as well as the so-called Arab Spring, El Saadawi firmly situates herself as a writer for social justice. In her polemics, justice cannot not exist without equality-equality for the poor, women, and among social classes. Many of her themes (both fictional and nonfictional) center on a debate about justice. Speculation on why these particular works were selected given El Saadawi’s large canon leads to the idea that in some ways, all her themes and concerns are found in the four newly issued works. Zed Books of London has recently reissued God Dies by the Nile and Other Novels and The Hidden Face of Eve. She doesn’t compromise because in many ways the condition of women in the Middle East has not changed much and because there is an ethos that, she believes, demands interrogation. I’m proud because I didn’t compromise.” Her insistence on sharing her view of the truth on the condition of women, religion, and politics is the key to the continued interest in her works. Not because I did fantastic things, but because I never changed. In a 2012 interview, now eighty-four-year-old Nawal El Saadawi confessed that “I’m proud of myself. God Dies by the Nile and Other Novels. London.