Remembering Nawal El Saadawi

Abstract

At exactly 21:15 Beijing time on March 21, 2021, my PhD adviser, Professor Xue of Beijing Foreign Studies University, sent me a text message that Nawal El Saadawi had died. Several other scholars sent their condolences. Why me? I thought. It was because I had written the first PhD dissertation in China on Nawal’s works; I was the first Chinese reader to knock on the door of her Cairo apartment; and I had planned her 2014 tour of Beijing.In the early 2010s, my choice of Nawal El Saadawi as a dissertation topic raised eyebrows. Some senior scholars deplored my choice, because they saw in Nawal an attention seeker playing to the gallery. Others were genuinely concerned, sensing that this inexperienced student might suffer consequences if she dived into such controversy. I had my own reasons. I had always been skeptical of what was canonical, and my skepticism often turned out to be well founded. My adviser didn’t consider the controversy problematic. So I continued with my studies and got in touch with Nawal.At 2:00 p.m. on February 1, 2013, I knocked on the door of her Cairo apartment overlooking the Nile, exactly as we had agreed in emails. Yet she was surprised to see me, saying that many people wouldn’t show up for their appointments with her. “But you have to be quick,” she added, her silver-white hair like a flambeau against the mahogany furniture. “I’m going to Tahrir Square soon. They are waiting for me.” She regularly joined young men and women at the protests during the Egyptian revolt of January 2011. Two years later she would still get together with them from time to time. Sometimes there were new protests; sometimes they would just talk—she seemed to really enjoy their company.We discussed my PhD research; then I gave her a painting of two koi chasing each other’s tails—a pattern common in East Asian arts and crafts. “This is the Taoist yin-and-yang double-fish diagram, the archetypal male and female in Chinese cosmological myths,” I said. “It recalls Hamidu and Hamida in Circling Song.”“Circling Song? The story of the twins?” Nawal’s eyes widened, intrigued by any connection between her novel and this Chinese ink-and-wash painting.I explained that those two fish were an artistic presentation of yin-and-yang duality, which first appeared in the I Ching, or Book of Changes. Taoism adopted yin-and-yang duality and introduced it into the “Chinese Big Bang story”: out of “One” (a being created from Tao, or Way of the Universe), “Two”—the yin-and-yang couple—was born.“Aren’t they similar to the concept of identical twins, developing from the same fertilized egg? Or Adam and Lilith from the same chunk of earth? Was it a deliberate mistake to present the boy and the girl as identical twins? Why do you add a letter to the masculine name Hamid? Are Hamida and Gannat from The Innocence of the Devil inspired by Lilith?“The twins Hamidu and Hamida are based on ancient Egyptian myths—many Egyptian gods were born in pairs, like twins. I found out about Lilith much later. . . . “When my people first drew the koi thousands of years ago, they didn’t know about Lilith either.”For a few moments Nawal seemed to have forgotten about Tahrir Square. She paced to and fro in the living room, looking for a place to hang the painting. Our discussion would last longer than that winter afternoon. We agreed to meet again in Beijing the following year.On August 20, 2013, I left Beijing as a visiting scholar sent by the Chinese Ministry of Education to work with miriam cooke, Nawal’s personal friend, at Duke University, where Nawal had spent four years in exile. During my stay there, I worked on my dissertation and translated into Chinese the novella Circling Song (1973) and two short stories, “She Was the Weaker” and “There’s No Place for Her in Paradise.” Highly symbolic and artfully coded, Circling Song is now known and appreciated in the Chinese academy.Nawal did much more than just point an accusing finger at the misogynist and hypocritical practices in her society. A medical doctor, she anguished over the physiological and psychological sufferings of her sisters in the Egyptian countryside but also around the world. In her fiction we read the theorist and reformist calling for an end to the politicization of the philosophical and spiritual. She urged her readers to discern the “patriarch” intertwined with the image of “God” in Abrahamic religions.Constantly accused of being “Westernized,” Nawal was, on the contrary, rooted in her Egyptian experience. She was, as she concluded in her autobiography, a daughter of Isis. Refuting any theory that sees in Woman a lesser form of Man, she tried to restore the archetypal female that was hidden and obliterated. This archetype can be traced back to the biblical Lilith, who was created equal to Adam.In late September 2014 Nawal arrived at Beijing Foreign Studies University, reunited with miriam cooke. She was greeted by prominent Chinese scholars of Arabic studies and surrounded by hundreds of Chinese students majoring in Arabic. There were general readers and fans, too, including Cao Pengling, the first (in 1988) to translate Nawal’s novel Woman at Point Zero into Chinese. At Beijing Normal University, Nawal had a conversation with some well-known poets and literary critics, including Ouyang Jianghe and Tang Xiaodu, who had read my translations of selected works. Ouyang declared that Nawal’s literature was not an abstraction divorced from reality, society, and politics. It “recognized itself” when combined with her practices as a medical doctor and a feminist activist. Tang noted “the power of pain.” The attention Nawal gave to the disadvantaged, he remarked, recalled the Chinese literary tradition traced back to the May 4 Movement. The documenting of “pain” and the “destructive effect” of her scientific discourse on her literary discourse set her apart as a writer. Nawal’s literary works won appreciation as Literature with a capital L.Given similar experiences during the twentieth century, these Chinese intellectuals could identify with Nawal’s mission. Her combination of “pen and scalpel” reminds any common reader in China of Lu Xun, the most venerated writer in modern China. He also studied medicine before shifting to literature, finding in literature a more powerful remedy for his nation, and the pen in his hand a sharper scalpel against its chronic malady. However, Nawal’s deconstruction of patriarchal hierarchy and her restoration of the archetypal female parallel to her brother came as an eye-opener to a nation that invented the yin-and-yang double-fish diagram thousands of years ago but now sees in it nothing but a clichéd decorative pattern.In May 2015 I defended my dissertation, advised by Professor Xue and co-advised by Professor cooke and El Saadawi herself. I argued that El Saadawi spoke with an alienated insider’s voice; that she redefined her sex rather than being against it; that she remained deeply rooted in her own cultural heritage while being fully aware of the patriarchal elements within Arab culture and the Arabic language.Although my dissertation received high honors, and parts of it appeared in and outside China as journal articles, the monograph faced difficulty getting published because of its “controversial topic.” The concern of those senior scholars years ago was not unfounded. In June 2020 I was informed that this book could not be published. Two months later a friend who cofounded a small publishing house in the United Arab Emirates helped me, and the first monograph in Chinese on Nawal El Saadawi was finally released.My engagement with Nawal has allowed me to live fully, to travel across the world and to meet with many whose names I would otherwise have read only in footnotes and quotations. Above all, I have felt free to express what I believe to be correct and true, regardless of the consequences—this is what I learned from Nawal. Very few live; most exist. Nawal El Saadawi lived her eighty-nine years. I will try to do the same with Isis, Lilith, and Nawal as my guides.