Walking through Fire: The Later Years of Nawal El Saadawi, In Her Own Words
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About this ebook
'Words should not seek to please, to hide the wounds in our bodies, or the shameful moments in our lives. They may hurt, give us pain, but they can also provoke us to question what we have accepted for thousands of years.'
Nawal El Saadawi is one of the greatest writers to come out of the Arab world. Born in a small Egyptian village in 1931, her life and writings have shown an extraordinary strength of character and a unique ability to create new worlds in the fight against oppression. Saadawi has been pilloried, censored, imprisoned and exiled for her refusal to accept the oppression imposed on women by gender and class. Still, she continues to write.
In A Daughter of Isis, Nawal El Saadawi painted a beautifully textured portrait of the childhood that moulded her into a novelist and fearless campaigner for freedom and the rights of women. Walking through Fire takes up the story of her extraordinary life. We read about her as a rural doctor, trying to help a young girl escape from a terrible fate imposed on her by a brutal male tyranny. We learn about her activism for female empowerment and the authorities that try to obstruct her. We travel with her into exile after her name is put on a fundamentalist death list. We witness her three marriages, each offering in their way love, companionship and shared struggle. And we gain an unprecedented insight into this most wonderful of creative minds.
Nawal El-Saadawi
Nawal El Saadawi (1931-2021) was an internationally renowned feminist writer and activist from Egypt. She founded and became president of the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association and co-founded the Arab Association for Human Rights. Among her numerous roles in public office she served as Egypt’s National Director of Public Health and stood as a candidate in the 2004 Egyptian presidential elections. El Saadawi held honorary doctorates from the universities of York, Illinois at Chicago, St Andrews and Tromso, and her numerous awards include the Council of Europe North-South Prize, the Women of the Year Award (UK), Sean MacBride Peace Prize (Ireland), and the National Order of Merit (France). She wrote over fifty novels, short stories and non-fiction works which centre on the status of Arab women, which have been translated into more than thirty languages.
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Reviews for Walking through Fire
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- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Because Walking Through Fire is memoir it is impossible for me to separate it from the factual details of Nawal El Saadawi’s life. While reading it I had an urge to learn more about her—and about the times in which she’s lived—in order to better understand who she was and why things happened to (and around) her as they did. Three main themes run through Walking Through Fire: exile, resistance, and feminism. Coupled with exile and resistance is the powerful idea of writing as a means of having a voice even when one has been exiled and one’s power has been taken away. Writing, then, is a means of resistance, and sharing one’s story with others is a means of empowerment and also motivation to others to seek their own empowerment. Feminism and women’s rights are also joined with ideas of empowerment and resistance, and tainted (to a degree) by religious ideologies that run counter to concepts of rights for women.
Nawal El Saadawi is an exile in many ways. She is exiled from her country when her name appears on a death list for being a heretic and she is also in some ways in exile from herself. On page 1 she takes us through a morning in 1993, she stretches, she rises, she refers to herself as “I” and we, the readers, know who we are experiencing this with. Then, curiously, she writes “I look down at her feet” (1). She is looking at her own feet, yet suddenly she distances herself from this woman. But why? Is it because she is reminded of her resemblance to her grandmother and her past in Kafr Tahla? Even in her memories she is separate from her own country during this time of exile.
She is also an exile because she was born a woman. Female children are not celebrated as male children are, and while pregnant with her own daughter she wonders “Why should my presence in the world be a cause for sadness in the family?” (65) and vows to celebrate her child, should she be a daughter. When she is engaged to Ahmed Helmi he gives her a ring but not the traditional shabka (a gift of necklace, bracelet, and/or earrings, literally meaning “the hook”) and her mother is horrified, worried about what people might think. Her friends are nearly as horrified, wondering what she is thinking, marrying a man who does not give her this traditional gift as an expression of financial stability.She, however, sees it differently, writing “The word shabka filled me with terror. Was I being hooked to the bridegroom?” (36)
Women are not valued in many ways in Egyptian society. They are to obey their husbands under Islamic law and El Saadawi is not pleased with this or other facets of this family law. “Honour was always linked to the behavior of women, to a particular part in the lower half of their bodies.” (63) Men have the right to kill their wives if they commit adultery and men also have the right to take multiple wives. El Saadawi chafes under this—and other—double standards. She is a doctor, she wants to be above and beyond a family law that treats her like a child or someone who is mentally defective and unable to care for him or herself.
Truly, though, Nawal El Saadawi is a resistor. When she relates to us (through her writing) the memory of her husband Ahmed Helmi choking her and trying to kill her she writes of how she does not call out for assistance: “Since childhood I had never called out for help. Instead I thought of ways to resist, or to escape.” (157) She uses her writing as a way to resist all the exiles in her life. “After leaving Egypt I started to write. The threat of death seemed to give my life a new importance, made it worth writing about.” (3) The reason behind why she writes instead of resisting in other ways is made clear in a section of the book on pages 162-163 when she discusses book burning with her friend Samia. Samia fears that Nawal’s books will burnt and Nawal says to let them burn because it does not matter. They engage in a conversation about where books are now stored, they are no longer only paper, they are not in computers, they are stored “on tablets of material which does not burn” kept in heaven. Samia thinks she means that books are stored in God’s keeping, but Nawal does not. She talks of storage on disc and how “millions of copies can spread out across space like viruses and be multiplied endlessly…” (163) “But what is most important,” she says, “is that books can no longer be burned.”