Nawal El Saadawi

Abstract

Writer, activist, and physician. She was born on Oct 27, 1931, in Kafr Tahla, Egypt, and died on March 21, 2021, in Cairo, Egypt, aged 89 years. Nawal El Saadawi gained international attention, acclaim, and death threats for her feminist writings and her lectures decrying discrimination against women. That demand for equal rights for women was shaped by her own experiences and her work as a doctor serving women in rural Egypt. “She often repeated that her medical education was invaluable…Her time working with these poor village women was the major influence in her life”, said miriam cooke, Braxton Craven Professor of Arab Cultures at Duke University in Durham, NC, USA, who worked closely with El Saadawi, particularly when she sought exile at Duke in the early 1990s after her name appeared on an Islamic fundamentalist death list. “Because she had a holistic view of life, her creative side and her scientific side were intertwined. She wasn't strictly a scientist and she wasn't strictly an artist. She was both at the same time”, said Adele Newson-Horst, Professor of English and Coordinator of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Morgan State University in Baltimore, MD, USA, who edited books on El Saadawi. In a 2010 interview, El Saadawi said that feminism united all of her endeavours: “It is social justice, political justice, sexual justice…It is the link between medicine, literature, politics, economics, psychology and history.” El Saadawi blazed her own path from a young age. Her parents attempted to arrange her marriage when she was 10 years old. She resisted and eventually pursued an education and won a scholarship to attend Cairo University, graduating in 1955 with a medical degree. When Reda Eldanbouki, the Executive Director of the Women's Center for Guidance and Legal Awareness in Cairo, attended a 2000 seminar El Saadawi gave on discrimination against women, he recalls that El Saadawi began with her own story of being subjected to female genital mutilation (FGM) when she was a child. “She told a story about how it was painful and useless”, Eldanbouki said. El Saadawi, who described the horror of undergoing FGM in her book The Hidden Face of Eve, continued to campaign against FGM in her writing and speeches, even after it was criminalised in Egypt in 2008. After completing medical school, El Saadawi worked as a doctor in a rural village and was a champion of health education. She was also writing, with her first collection of short stories published in 1957 and Memoirs of a Woman Doctor in 1958. “She had come to the conclusion that maybe she had gifts that were not fully exploited as a village doctor”, cooke said. “There she was healing women one at a time and she realised very soon after she started to write that she could heal thousands of people with her writing.” Yet El Saadawi continued to pursue a career in health care, earning a master's degree in public health from Columbia University in New York, USA, in 1966, before returning to Cairo to work in the ministry of health. She lost her position there after the publication of Women and Sex that drew a link between violence against women and political and economic oppression. She moved to Ain Shams University in Cairo, researching women and mental health, and then held positions abroad with the UN from 1978 to 1980, including as an adviser on women's development programmes in the Middle East and Africa. After returning to Egypt, she was imprisoned in September, 1981, alongside many other intellectuals and liberals persecuted by former President Anwar Sadat's regime. While incarcerated, she began to write Memoirs from the Women's Prison with an eyebrow pencil on a roll of toilet paper. Evelyne Accad, an author and Professor Emerita at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, USA, invited El Saadawi to headline a conference after she was released, weeks after Sadat's assassination in October, 1981. Although still in physical pain from her imprisonment, she agreed. “Women coming from various horizons to hear about women's struggles and how to overcome the insidiousness of patriarchy felt uplifted by a woman like Nawal, who was overcoming so many odds, yet stood up with courage, resistance, and resiliency”, said Accad, who is also Professor Emerita at the Lebanese American University in Beirut, Lebanon. El Saadawi published more than 50 novels, works of non-fiction, and plays. “She was a non-stop whirlwind”, cooke said, producing work that marked her as “one of the leaders of transnational feminism”. El Saadawi also founded the Arab Women's Solidarity Association to promote women's participation in politics, economics, and culture. And she remained a political activist, even standing briefly for the Egyptian presidency in 2005. She is survived by a daughter, Mona Helmy, and a son, Atef Hetata.