La Vie en Rouge

Abstract

I met her through her writing, so powerful and impassioned a plea for truth and justice that I had not come across before. I was thrilled by the intimacy of her thoughts, marveling at her unflinching depiction of female oppression in a society dominated by corrupt men. She also powerfully delineated the subversive space inhabited by her heroines, such as Firdaus. Where had I seen those eyes before? How did I know that pain and passion? Why did the world of Woman at Point Zero feel like a familiar yet strangely distant dream? My world was not that world, after all. I was born into a middle-class, urban, educated Pakistani Muslim family—a far cry from a women’s prison in Egypt.My quest for answers led me, several decades ago, to track Nawal’s whereabouts and wait for the perfect opportunity to present itself—which it did, to my great delight. Fall had given way to winter, there had been an icy drizzle earlier in the day, and I knew that the drive into Manhattan would not be an easy one from my home in upstate New York. Nevertheless, I was determined. The writer whose novels I had been incorporating into my courses for a while was going to be in town. She was to give a lecture at a famous underground haunt favored by leftist intellectuals and activists, named for Bertolt Brecht. This was not a chance I could pass up—a meeting with my idol!The room was packed. No number of photographs I’d seen on book covers could have prepared me for the shock of her presence. The shoulder-length white halo of hair, dazzling, daring the audience with its wildly obscene purity framing a wheatberry-complexioned face, its darkness accentuated by the contrasting hair, with not a spot of makeup, the wrinkles around the laughing eyes and wide mouth like lines in freshly damp earth. But what took my breath away were her eyes, dark circles surrounded by rings of white, a magnetic force field that held us all captive to their gaze. . . . The singsong quality of her voice, the guttural intonation of an Arabic-inflected English, the disarming candor of barbed words made palatable by a wicked smile . . . I lapped it all up.Yet not everything she said made sense to me. Here was a woman who had written of the horror of being awakened in the middle of the night at the tender age of six or seven years, dragged off to the bathroom by her mother and another woman to be “circumcised,” saying that orgasm for a woman is a mental thing and therefore that having a mutilated clitoris does not necessarily prevent a woman’s experience of sexual pleasure. Why was she diminishing the painful experience here? She then compared female clitoridectomy to male circumcision—a parallel that further reduced the harmful effects of FGM on women by refusing to see it as sui generis. When I questioned her, she answered that female orgasm is as much a psychological as a physiological phenomenon—something Freud had never understood. That gave me pause, and I only later grasped her comments as a challenge to imperialist feminists who see Muslim and non-Western women as extreme others, always victims of culture rather than of a global class patriarchal system.From that first meeting there was no looking back, with our bond growing ever stronger over the decades. In 2000 Nawal accepted a one-year creative writer-in-residence position I arranged for her at my university, Montclair State. At a public talk she asked the audience, which comprised many students representing the Muslim Student Association on campus, to ponder why the veiling of women, a pre-Islamic practice, had been wrongly declared an Islamic injunction. This resulted in an immediate uproar, so what did she do? Smiling, she walked to one of the angriest members of the audience, who was insisting that she was wrong and that God demands that women of the Ummah be veiled. Nawal bent down to the young man and quietly but clearly asked, “Did God whisper that in your ear?” I have never forgotten that electrifying moment: Nawal fearless and uncompromising in her commitment to challenge an obscurantist mindset by engaging the speaker to think critically around questions of interpretation and what ends religion serves for differently situated bodies.Sherif Hetata once told me that being married to Nawal was like climbing a mountain: tough going, but if one reached the summit, the view was worth it! Ya Nawal—the view you afforded us was glorious and fierce.It is the first night of my weeklong stay at Nawal’s daughter’s apartment in Cairo, where I am attending an Arab Women’s Solidarity Association conference. The muezzin is calling faithful Cairenes to Fajr prayers. The call, insistent, shrill, powerfully male, has penetrated my dreams . . .the muezzin is dancing, on the radiator grilleThe sherif don’t like it, rock the casbah, rock the casbah . . .No, no, you are wrong, I try and tell them, but they of the long lashes and sweet faces have transformed into a menacing gang. I know I have to run, to escape somehow, I am weeping at my impending rape. . . . I jump out the French windows of the apartment onto the terrace below mine, then find that I’m on a beach, and I am off, running on the sand, chased by gorgeously threatening young men who all remind me of my mother. Then, without warning, it is the muezzin’s voice that follows me into my dream. “Wake up, in the name of Allah,” it screams, and I am suddenly grateful for it. . . .I have been saved, perhaps from myself, from defilement, even death. I open my eyes to a very misty morning by the Nile, wondering about gendered oppressions and mortality, and the woman upstairs. Through the rest of the day, listening to women from around the world discuss how they have navigated their relationship with creativity and dissidence, I muse on the meaning of my jet-lagged dream.What am I afraid of? Who were those threatening men, reminding me of my mother, chasing me on a beach without end? What could potential rapists possibly have in common with a mother whose job it was to protect her daughter from such a terrible fate? Why had I, during an evening spent exchanging confidences with Nawal, confessed to hating my mother? I couldn’t stop thinking of Firdaus’s mother, who bestowed maternal love on her young female child until Firdaus asked her one day about her father’s identity. That impudent question led the mother not just to withdraw her affection from her daughter but to punish her in other ways as well.Nawal and the organizers had arranged for delegates to be taken for an evening of music on a boat called Ramses II anchored on the Nile. Disquieting dreams notwithstanding, I’m excited to listen to some local music and to watch some belly dancing—Orientalism be damned! There are others on board besides the conference-goers, including some women in hijab and niqab. I recall my dream, thinking about muezzins who penetrate dreams and unmask secrets.Nawal repeatedly asserted that she was unafraid to die at the hands of extremists who called her an infidel simply for questioning received pieties and challenging patriarchal strictures. This magical evening on the boat, she insists that I sing. Haltingly at first, then with increasing boldness, I encourage the audience to get up from their seats. Slowly, one of the women in niqab removes her face veil and joins us on the dance floor, swaying her body sinuously to the rhythm of my song. Nawal’s face lights up in excitement and delight; she ululates as she urges the band to keep playing and for me to keep singing, the moon shyly spreading apart the blanket of a dark night.Nawal, to the end, was an unswerving secularist, committed to separation of state and religion. This made her both the darling of Western liberal feminists—who see veiled Muslim women as uniformly oppressed—and the target of Islamists on the right, who often hounded her, to the point where she had to leave Egypt and seek refuge elsewhere. When she was a visiting writer at my university, she spent a weekend at my home, and she counseled me, with great compassion and understanding, to forgive my mother.That is when I realized that her greatest gift to me, and to countless other women of secular Islamic heritage, was a clarity of vision that keeps us resistant to the pressures of Western Orientalist framings of Islam, on the one hand, and calls to perform our piety according to fundamentalist interpretations, on the other, that so many well-meaning women (including my liberal mother) had fallen prey to. Then she-who-must-be-obeyed, the visionary from the future, beloved Nawal of the white mane, settling comfortably into my sofa, commands, “Now please sing to me that Sufi poem about being neither married nor single, but having a girl-child to rock in your arms. . . . ”Ya Nawal! I will sing for you. In so doing, I will continue to honor your voice, resistant to the normative assumptions that seek to imprison us east to west.Ik toona achambaan gawan geeMei ruthra yaar manawan gee. . . .I will sing to cast a spellI will sing to bring my lost Beloved back. . . .—“Spell,” by Bulleh Shah, seventeenth-century Indian Sufi poet