A novel, a prize and several more street brawls: the iron woman of contemporary Arabic literature puts forth on life and love Talking to Nawal El-Saadawi -- novelist, women's rights activist and impassioned critic of religious discourse and practise -- turns out to be rather more rewarding than reading the first several thousand words of her last book, Al-Ruwaya (The Novel), published last week in the literary journal Akhbar Al-Adab. "I'm a very cheerful person," she begins. "This is what sustains me. Even in the worst conditions I keep up the high spirits. My happiness, my joy in being alive," she goes on, smiling. "This awareness is renewed every morning. You wake up and you're still in one piece. You're alive and well, and that in itself is enough. "In our country you think at 60 people should be already dead, maybe the life expectancy figure is actually lower than that. So when you're over 70 and you wake up in one piece, what more could you possibly want to be happy? "I am so cheerful by nature I always wake up singing, in fact I think it's a genetic trait -- I will have got it from my father and my paternal grandmother, not my mother -- because I've always been like that, even in prison; so much so that when I was released before my cell mates, they were terribly depressed. And when they got scared and started talking about Sadat killing us, I told them, 'What would you say if I told you we will all live to see him dead.' They called me a naïve child, but it turned out to be true..." The first of El-Saadawi's 12 novels to star writers, Al-Ruwaya -- in stark contrast to such optimistic, charming conversation -- is a dark, unhappy love story with overtones of historical angst, written in a manner reminiscent of generic romance. Contrary to the author's statements concerning the uniqueness of each new book she writes -- "A book dictates its form and content," she says -- it is all but thematically and stylistically identical to books like Mudhakirat Tabiba (Diary of a Woman Doctor, 1958), her debut, or Suqqout Al-Imam (The Fall of the Imam, 1984), the latter being the focus of an ongoing anti-censorship campaign triggered by Al- Azhar's recent injunction to withdraw it from circulation. Juxtaposing flowery, accounts of the heroes' personal lives with impressionistic, often forced socio-political critique, such writing is typical of El-Saadawi's brand of fictionalised polemics: loud and melodramatic. Though her writing professedly engages with current realities, El-Saadawi's day-to-day references and dialogue do not ring true, her language is too sentimental for comfort and her characters are too abstract to be convincing. In the end Al-Ruwaya constitutes neither an attempt at self- or other- knowledge nor a credible evaluation of contemporary life. In a characteristic confusion of priorities, literary and aesthetic attainment is sacrificed for "the cause". Which cause El-Saadawi is all too eager to expound. "I can only thank my lucky stars," she declares, "that our successive governments have not managed to put an end to my literary project, or to my joy in being alive, despite so many attempts to soil my reputation over the years, such a concerted effort to defile and destroy anyone opposed to injustice. If I were asked to identify my principal adversary on the creative and activist path, the path to justice and freedom, I would definitely say it's the ruling power, which we call a government, along with all its various arms -- the police, a cultural elite that has sold out, the press, the media, the judiciary... "Why do you ban a novel 20 years after it appears, for example, if not as an act of aggression against its author?" El-Saadawi refers to Suqqout Al-Imam. "Either it's a political campaign, an edict from the state to punish me for an opinion I expressed, or maybe for the [recent] publication of Kasr Al-Hudoud (Breaking the Limits), a bold and angry book in which I crossed several red lines. "Or else it's something altogether less plausible. Some would say that Al-Azhar was asleep and only just woke up, 20 years later. Another possibility is that some important party was so eager to work against me they invented a series of events that ultimately resulted in the banning of the book. Because I also heard that the decision was made after a film script based on the novel was submitted to the censor for approval, but I was never informed of any such cinematic project. I really don't know, you never know. It's a mystery, like Mamdouh Hamza's arrest [in London]. He's a respectable businessman, his reputation is irreproachable, there's no evidence against him, and yet he's arrested... "Nobody has dared to republish Suqqout Al- Imam since the ban. Mohamed Fayeq, who is the original publisher, phoned to say he would reissue the book, then he phoned back and said that he wouldn't be able to under the circumstances. Nobody had the courage. Everyone refused: Miret, Madbouli, Al-Thaqafa Al-Jadida. This is interesting in that it demonstrates that censorship is not all good," El-Saadawi adds, "in the sense that it increases sales or encourages people to read the book in question -- the well publicised benefits of censorship. A novel like Suqqout Al-Imam has been out of print for years, and however many more people want to read it now it's been banned no one has access to it, because no one will reissue it. It is simply unavailable." The debate surrounding Suqqout Al-Imam is but one of many battles in an ongoing, elaborately staged war not only on the government but on convention, prevalent religious discourse and the social-cultural status quo as well. El-Saadawi would not rest content with being released from prison two months after President Sadat's assassination in 1981, an occasion on which President Mubarak met the 1,536 political detainees in person to tell them they could "go home"; against the better judgement of fellow activists, who refused to join her in the belief that "it would be pointless to take the government to court", she filed a law suit, eventually receiving the puny amount of LE3,000 in compensation. "LE1,000 for each month spent in prison," she says, "but it was a symbolic vindication." This July, 13 years after she took legal action, the State Council finally responded to another court case she initiated following the illegal closure of the Egypt branch of the Arab Woman's Solidarity Association, whose members had protested against the 1991 Gulf War -- "an unlawful act of aggression", she says, in which the minister of social affairs Amal Osman was instrumental. "Where is the Egyptian judiciary," she laments. "My conviction is that delayed justice is in effect a form of injustice. It takes the State Council 13 years to respond. Even if the association comes back into being now, so what?" Judging by her reminiscences, indeed, El- Saadawi started engaging in such combat almost as soon as she was born: "I grew up in a relatively poor provincial environment," in the village of Kafr Talha, near Banha, Qalyoubiya, "and I saw the fellahin being beaten and imprisoned and humiliated, simply because they were poor. I saw women suffering the worst forms of subjugation imaginable: little girls being circumcised, prepubescent girls married off to much older patriarchs. Everywhere woman was restricted and brutally constrained. Even in my own family," El-Saadawi adds, "I realised that my brother had an advantage over me, and that was when I started to rebel." Even the question of why she chose to write about writers in her last book unwittingly reduces to a discussion of the writer's calling: "It's not necessarily the case that a character who just happens to be a writer should be different from one who is not. It hasn't been done very often, I certainly hadn't done it, but it just came out that way -- the protagonist who came to me was a writer, a novelist, and I was quite pleased with her. "You don't know how this works," she digresses, "you don't always have control over it. Things are forming secretly in your subconscious for years, and then suddenly they are born. It is a process uncannily like conception, gestation and delivery. And the sexual encounter could be something as simple and otherwise inconsequential as a moment of eye contact with a stranger... "A writer responds more emotionally to what goes on around him or her, though, and he or she expresses that response more forcefully. Isn't this why we write in the first place," El-Saadawi asks rhetorically. "We write because something bothers us. We are angry, indignant, or we feel unfair about something. So we give vent to such feelings in the creative act. Others are either too embroiled in the toilsome process of having enough to eat or too isolated in their money and materialistic values to feel it. Many have developed an immunity to oppression through sheer blunting of the senses... "As for myself, every time I go out on the street, I have to get into a fight. Because I invariably encounter instances of oppression. The other day," she recounts, "I saw this old, poor peasant woman trying to cross the street, and the traffic policeman was insulting her -- for no reason whatever, apart from the fact that she was so poor. So I lost my temper and had a fight with him, it was so unfair I couldn't stand it. What did I have to do with it? Nothing. Why must I get involved? Such incidents will happen maybe twice or three times a day. But this is what writers are like." Writers notwithstanding, El-Saadawi has equally little to say about the process of writing, or the specific circumstances or thoughts that led to the composition of Al-Ruwaya. "Seldom does a writer write to a schedule," she explains. "I never have a plan. I don't choose the subject. The subject simply manifests itself, it depends on the writer's circumstances. The idea of this book presented itself to me while I was on vacation in Spain. I would describe it as coincidental, but that is the way it always is. "It happens often that something very transitory will give you an idea. Maybe someone I've met on the plane will inspire me, triggering something very significant, whereas I could spend years with people, know them in and out, without being inspired by them at all. It's really incomprehensible, but it makes chemical sense. There is a chemistry to human interactions, the way there is a chemistry in love. You meet someone and something immediately, intuitively happens, and maybe you don't know anything about them. But you hate them for the rest of your life, or you're madly in love with them from the moment you set eyes on their face... "The point is," El-Saadawi insists, "I don't want to speak of writing as anything out of the ordinary or unnatural, or even necessarily intentional. Writing to me is a necessary process, a very basic activity that I can practise irrespective of circumstances or mood. It is like love making," a recurrent metaphor, this, "even breathing, yes. When I'm angry I can write, when I'm relaxed I can write. I could say I'm generally at my best when I'm in a state of physical and psychological well being, when I'm feeling energetic and secure. But it is just something that I do, whether or not this is the case. "They've just sent me the proofs with a list of things to remove," Saadawi refers to Dar Al-Hilal, which will publish Al-Ruwaya in October. "All those expressions relating to religion, some of them are really quite innocuous from the religious viewpoint. But like everyone else they're scared. Even Akhbar Al-Adab removed some things, things to do with the president as well as religion, because I went straight for the president in some passages. It's the way things are, sadly. Such lack of courage. "The one saving grace is that I am fortunate never to have had the feeling of being isolated from readers. I've had a readership since I started writing, I don't know why. And if you ask publishers they'll tell you that my books sell. Madbouli, Dar Al- Aadab. They sell. Even Kasr Al-Hudoud, a fat, expensive, difficult book -- it sold. They sell not only in the Arab world but outside, and I don't necessarily mean Europe and America. A lot of people buy my books in Japan, Indonesians have contacted me because they were writing theses on my work. Maybe it's because people like to see something a little rebellious," she concludes, "it gives them breathing space. So as long as I'm writing and being read, my anger and frustration notwithstanding, all seems well with the world." By Youssef Rakha
