What I Will Never Forget

Abstract

As I remember it, it was some time, some day in March 1993 that a lecture by Nawal El Saadawi was announced that I knew I would not miss. Though I did not know Nawal El Saadawi personally, I knew enough about her to make the lecture the priority of that day. And so I went. I remember Nawal sitting there while she was introduced. I was mesmerized by her presence, just sitting there, brown skin, white hair, and that I-do-not-know-what that people in the audience have felt just by being there. I could feel that something special was taking place.The introduction ended; Nawal stood up, looked at the audience, and walked toward the blackboard. She drew a large triangle. On the upper vertex of the triangle she wrote God; on the two lower vertices, Money and Veil. Calm, using the significance of silences, she turned to the audience and asked, “What are the relationships between those three words?” That, I thought, is the lecture. Now we had to think with her about the connections; we, the audience, were invited to think. What she literally said, I do not remember. But thinking about the complicities among God, Veil, and Money I will never forget.I do not know if Nawal published her presentation. It was really a talk, not a lecture. Nawal was not reading a paper, previously cooked. She was just talking. And this is the second unforgettable moment: when I saw that she was talking, not reading. Nawal is a full-fledged intellectual from the Third World, I thought with pleasure. We are not trained to write papers to read; we just organize the basic ideas and talk. Well, the Third World had just collapsed in 1993, but Nawal and I were born and educated in the Third World.When you read Nawal’s essays in The Nawal El Saadawi Reader (1997), you realize that she is talking in writing and you are reading her voice. Perhaps none of the essays collected there would have met the MLA’s academic standards. I think there is, for us, Third World people, an ingrained impediment to and difficulty with writing papers and reading papers. I have published a few pieces in PMLA. They are my best pieces in English, but they were not me. My sensing when writing had been brushed out. I was elated to be at Duke in the presence of a powerful woman intellectual from the Third World who was born and raised in a non-Western European land with a tongue untied to any of the six major modern European imperial languages. My intuition was confirmed when I began to read Nawal’s descriptions of what it means to write in a language that is not inscribed in your body. The first sentence of “Dissidence and Creativity” states: “I started writing this paper on the first of January 1995. I wrote it in English though my language is Arabic and my country is Egypt. . . . All my books, whether fiction or nonfiction, are written in Arabic and are published and read in Egypt and other countries of the Arab world” (El Saadawi 1997: 157).Although I do not remember the details of the talk, I can reconstruct what I remember from Nawal’s writing. In “Islamic Fundamentalism and Women” she says: “We Arab and Muslim women know that our authenticity is based on unveiling our minds and not in veiling our faces” (El Saadawi 1997: 97). The statement is made after Nawal argues that there is nothing in the Qurʾan that obliges women to veil themselves; she then describes the fashionable uses of the veil as a mark of high-class distinction. The higher echelon of the social ladder presupposes money that makes it possible to work on one’s clothed appearance to conform to institutional (more than religious) requirements. Working women of the peasantry and their husbands, Nawal comments, do not have enough money to buy veils, for they need what money they do have to buy bread.After 1998 I included Nawal’s essays in my regular graduate seminar on decolonial thinking. Liberating the captive mind has been one basic goal of decoloniality. The modern/colonial nation-states formed after independence in Africa and Asia, but also in South and Central America and the Caribbean, became signposts for native elites of “underdeveloped” countries to mutate settler colonialism into internal colonialism, with coloniality maintained and hidden by the rhetoric of modernity and modernization. Nawal’s writings are full of references, arguments, and stories that sustain the point. It is not surprising that she had to leave Egypt: dissidence and creativity are risky.At Duke her critique of coloniality/modernity did not abate. Here I quote from “Dissidence and Creativity” where she recalls her stunned reaction to a conference held in November 1994: I found myself sitting in a huge solemn hall, listening to men and women scholars, the women with big earrings, very red lips and thick makeup, the men wearing neckties, their fingernails manicured, smelling of aftershave and deodorants, their teeth and shoes shining in the electric light. Some of them are well known in the United States and Europe. They are not known to the majority of people who live in Africa, Asia or Latin America. . . . But they call themselves global scholars or international philosophers.Their language was so dry, so complicated, that the huge hall full of young students seeking knowledge was almost empty after the first session. These scholars drowned in abstract theories and words taken out of context. . . .They spoke about the responsibility of the intellectual towards oppressed people in the Third World, whom they called the “subaltern,” the “docile bodies” or the “subject.” We, the people in the so-called Third World[,] were reduced to bodies (docile or not), we were decapitated just as happened to women in the name of god in the three monotheistic religions. But then they forgot these ideas and solemnly announced the death of the intellectual, looking furtively around as though suspicious of whether they, the intellectuals, still existed and still had a function. (El Saadawi 1997: 164)Shortly after the God, Veil, and Money talk, I met Nawal in a friendly setting through the generosity and friendship of Bruce Lawrence and miriam cooke. There I encountered another Nawal, not the imposing presence that I had felt at the talk but the friendly and caring person I came to know. There are times in your life that you meet someone and have the sensation that you knew that person from before. Well, it is not that singular person whom you meet for the first time, but what that person carries in her, embodies literally, that you recognize.Beyond continents, and languages, and local histories, and gender, I knew that if a couple of months earlier I had sat in admiration listening to a Third World intellectual, now I was with a friend, who received me from the heart. One day Nawal and Sherif invited me and my then wife, Anne Wylie, for dinner. I do not remember where the house was, someplace in Durham near campus. In my memory it was a brick house with large trees in the back, very common in this area. But not for Nawal: Since January 1993, I have been in this small house overlooking Duke Forest with its dense masses of tall cedars, pines and oak trees: an inundation of green. The sight is not a familiar one to me. The word “forest” is strange to the ears of a woman who has spent her life in Egypt: the valley of the Nile, the tranquil river, its waters slipping by, never overflowing, never flooding, the ribbon of green fields winding through the yellow sands, shrinking as the desert and concrete walls close in on it from every side. (El Saadawi 1999: 16)Beyond these indelible memories, there is one more, perhaps of a cosmic endurance: I came to Duke from Ann Arbor, Michigan, in January 1993, the same month and year that Nawal came to Duke from Cairo. The circumstances couldn’t have been more dissimilar, but the month and year were the same.