Ignu Reads

             

                      “Let me speak. Do not interrupt me. I have no time to listen to you,”

 

 

The story of firdaus is a remarkable one, it represents the hardships women go through in Egypt as many middle Eastern countries and patriarchal societies. Firdaus’s storytelling is moving, heartfelt, and honest. A story of victim of capitalism, patriarchy and oppressive regime of Sadat.

Nawal Saadawi is an Egyptian Anarcho-feminist, doctor, novelist, and leftist revolutionary, if you want to know more about her ( click here ) .  Saadawi was conducting a study on the effects of prison on female prisoners when she came across Firdaus in Qanatir Prison. She heard of Firdaus from a doctor who believed that Firdaus is incapable of killing a man and thus unworthy of a death penalty. Firdaus refused to see anyone, she barely ate, but after repetitive appeals from Nawal to meet her, she finally agreed to tell her story a day before the judgment .

Firdaus’ struggle is to claim her body as her own. Since her childhood, decisions concerning her were never hers to take, her parents cut off her clitoris at a young age. Her uncle took her away when her parents died, and then he did whatever he pleased with her fragile body, eventually he forced her to marry a man so old when she was only 19 of age. Men in the street look at her as if her body existed only for them, to please them.

Firdaus comes from a poor family, she got to school and had a high school certificate, but she never made it to the university. First reason, her uncle was a man of religion, a scholar, and for him it was shameful to his honor to send his niece to a mixed university where she will be seated side by side to men. Second reason, her uncle saw her dowry could help him, and make him get rid of her. Firdaus wanted to finish her studies, she liked to read, it gave her room for imagining a bigger greater world where she can escape.

Women in the story all suffer from imprisonment, an invisible cage designed to trap women. All females that Firdaus encountered are living in illusions, weather it is marriage, work, religion, or respect. Firdaus did every role a woman is destined to do in a patriarchal society, she did the housewife, the daughter, the student, the worker, and the prostitute, and she came up with the conclusion that all of these only imprisoned her. All men in the story sought of Ferdaus as a territory made for them, her father to beat her, and everyone else to abuse her sexually, literally all men she met.

She was never expected to have an opinion on things, until she escaped the marriage. She was surprised and confused when she was asked weather she prefers oranges or tangerines. Nawal Saadawi took it that far to accentuate the extent women are not allowed to have a taste of their own, to not have a choice.

Firdaus embraces death. For her it is liberating, it is freeing. Death alone can save her from her misery, and her destiny of a woman. She believes that women whatsoever their class, or status are suppressed, are not free from male dominance, and she wants to escape her destiny.

I Believe that this is a must read for feminist from all over the world, it is relevant, poignant, and moving. The storyline is relatable for women from all regions of the world. Plus it is a short but powerful read.

 

 

 

“ I just wept, and called out to my mother for help. But the worst shock of all was when I looked around and found her standing by my side. Yes. It was her, I could not be mistaken, in flesh and blood, right in the midst of these strangers, talking to them and smiling at them as though they had not participated in slaughtering her daughter just a few minutes ago.”
 The Hidden Face of Eve, Nawal el Saadawi. 

Nawal el Saadawi is a medical doctor, Egyptian feminist, campaigner against Female Genital Mutilation, she has written fifty books in her lifetime and she was nominated for a Nobel Prize in Literature. she contributed a great deal in the revolution that took place in Egypt, she was surrounded by thousands of young revolutionaries, she shared her knowledge and wisdom with them. Her major characters are ordinary women, through her books she shock, question, and provoke. Nawal el Saadawi has liberated generations of women from the oppression or brainwash they were subjected to, not only in Egypt but throughout the Arab world.

Nawal el Saadawi was born in Cairo, Egypt in 1931, back in the days she was lucky enough to get educated, although her parents wanted to wed her at the age of ten but her mother stood out for her when she refused to get married, she was as all young girls back then circumcised, it is a very painful childhood memory for her. Nawal el Saadawi was good at school, she was acing her classes which allowed her to get into med school unlike her older brother who was lazy and spoiled. Nawal el Saadawi worked for the Egyptian Government as director General for Public Health Education, she also founded a magazine, “Health”, but she lost both of them in 1972 after her public statements and criticism of social norms, and the political regime of the president Sadat.

Nawal el Saadawi’s first book “Women and Sex” was censured, and attacked by fundamentalists and Egyptian society in general. The book brings to light two main topics, female genital mutilation, and   virginity. In the rural areas of Egypt FGM was performed in unsafe conditions which put thousands of young girl’s lives at risk,  in general Nawal el Saadawi expressed her anger and rage toward these inhumane and patriarchal traditions that women pay the price for every day, she cited scientific references concerning clitoris and condemned stripping women of their sexuality with the removal of the clitoris. Moreover, the book also discusses in great length the topic of virginity, which is in the East the thermometer of purity of girls, in Egypt and other Arab countries, girls can get killed if they were not virgins at their wedding night, it is considered to be  disgraceful to the honor of the family. Nawal el Saadawi challenged these traditions on a scientific basis, she shows in her books all kinds of hymns, and how some girls are born without virginity, while some of the others lose it not necessarily through sex since hymns are very fragile in nature, she also attacks these norms. Women And Sex was censured in Egypt, but students and intellectuals specially women found a way to smuggle it and read it secretly, it was a revolution or a turning point on how women perceive themselves, and how they reacted to patriarchal oppression in their environments.

  Nawal el Saadawi is very engaged politically. She was imprisoned,  exiled, and received death threats. She was imprisoned for three months for crimes against the state based on her outspoken political views and criticism, in these months she wrote a book on  a roll of toilet paper with a eyebrow pencil smuggled by a prostitute, the book was titled “Memoirs from the women’s prison”, in 1993 she fled to the US after series of death threats, and during the Arab spring she lived her dream, she said she had dreams of revolution since she was a kid and in 2011 she made the revolution happen along many many other intellectuals, a lot of young Egyptians used to gather around her to learn and debate with her; after the Arab spring a group of young women, most of them are big fans of her writings, founded sort of a book club in which they organize meetings to talk about her books in great length, and she never missed a meeting.

Nawal el Saadawi is called the “ the white demon” amongst fundamentalists. Nawal el Saadawi advocates secularism, specially in her book, “God Resigns in the Summit Meeting”. She believes that all religions, specially monotheistic religions, oppress women, and she considers the revival of Political Islam as a threat to what feminist has fought for in the middle east.

Regarding veil, she said that women don’t chose, it is imposed on them through a process of socialization, she believes that veil is offensive to women. “"What do we mean by choice? It is pressure, but it is hidden pressure – she is not aware of it. I was exposed to different pressures from my sisters. We are all the products of our economic, social and political life and our education. Young people today are living in the era of the fundamentalist groups."

Nawal el Saadawi was married three times, and she lives alone in an apartment in Cairo, not near from Maydan Tahrir. Regarding her first husband she said, “No, no, that’s the problem. My first husband was a great man, my colleague in the medical college. He was fascinating, and he was the father of my daughter. My father didn’t want me to marry him because he had gone to Suez to fight the British. But then [after Suez] the guerrilla fighters were betrayed, many of them imprisoned. This crisis broke him, and he became an addict. I was told that if I married him, he might stop his addictions, but he didn’t. He tried to kill me, so I left him.”.
about her second husband, “He was a man of law, very patriarchal.
I am not really fit for the role of a wife, you must be sure of that.”
Regarding her third husband whom she loved and lived with for long she wrote, “My third husband [Sherif Hatata], the father of my son, was a very free man, a Marxist who’d been imprisoned. I lived with him for 43 years, and I told everyone: this is the only feminist man on earth. And then I had to divorce him, too. He was a liar. He was having relations with other women. oh, the complexity of the patriarchal character. He wrote books about gender equality, and then he betrayed his wife. Ninety-five per cent of men are like that, I’m sure.”

Nawal el Saadawi was at the center of international attention last year after she was nominated for a Nobel Prize In Literature, but she had been invited to lecture in the US, England and Germany as well as other European and Arab countries, she was even offered asylum, but she refused. She insists on fulfilling her role as an intellectual in her beloved country, Egypt. She is a fighter, a brave women, and a radical activist.

The following article is an introductory insight on Nawal el Saadawi, and it is the beginning of a series of readings of Middle Eastern, North African and Arab Feminists and writers, next one is an analysis of Nawal el Saadawi’ s book “Women At Point Zero. Stay tuned.

Constructive criticism is highly welcomed. 

AS soon as the CT scan was done, I began reviewing the images. The diagnosis was immediate: Masses matting the lungs and deforming the spine. Cancer. In my neurosurgical training, I had reviewed hundreds of scans for fellow doctors to see if surgery offered any hope. I’d scribble in the chart “Widely metastatic disease — no role for surgery,” and move on. But this scan was different: It was my own.

When Breath Becomes Air is an unfinished memoir published posthumously written by Paul Kalanithi, he is/was a chief neurosurgeon resident, he also had two master degrees in both literature and the history and philosophy of science. Paul at the age of 35 got diagnosed with stage four lung cancer at a moment when he was close to achieving his potential, and he had wrote the book in his deathbed. The book is an examination of Paul’s life, about what gave his life a meaning. To label the book as a cancer book would be unfair to Paul’s purpose, it is not as much about death as it is about the art of living a meaningful life, it is a profound insight on mortality, philosophy, and literature, it is a book about the classical debates on science vs literature and which one explains the human experience more deeply.




Finishing high school, Paul was interested in literature and philosophy, as well as biology, therefor he decided to major both of them, for him these fields provided different perspectives on mortality, death, and meaning. His biggest dream back then was to be a writer since for him literature provided the best account of the life of the mind, and later on he becomes equally interested in neuroscience which studied the brain as an organism that ignites meaning, language, and interpretations of the world around us. He was driven by his quest for meaning, and he was eager to lead a life that would give him the chance to confront death, and suffering, he chose to find the answers which books didn’t provide about what makes human life meaningful even in the face of death and decay. During his residency as a neurosurgeon he was surrounded by decay and death indeed, each day he witnessed people die, and others live, he saw people losing their identities, their abilities to communicate, and most importantly people losing what gives their life a meaning. Paul became a chief resident, he became more responsible, more experienced, and more insightful, so he could feel the life he was aspiring becoming so reachable, but then he was diagnosed with stage four of lung cancer.




With his diagnosis everything started feeling so uncertain, his dreams, his hopes, and his body were all shifting, and becoming distant with each day. Paul had to decide what gives his life a meaning, he chose to depend his future on how much he will live, he hope he’ll have enough time to preserve both the identity he grew into, and the identities of his future patients, and he had another plan to become a writer and a father if he had less than two years to live.




One of the few lessons to learn from this book, and apply on our lives for a meaningful future is would be keeping on doing the same mundane activities if we knew we would die within the next four or three months. Grab a paper, and write a list of things you would do, for me I would defiantly tell my brother how much I hate him, or write a book, maybe I would tell someone I love how much I love them, or spend more time with those close to me, and be grateful to have them in my life. The lesson we learn from this book is in order to live, we have to embrace the fact of our mortality, to understand what makes our lives meaningful, what is the hidden force that keep us on striving tirelessly.












Another thing I loved about the book is how independent and smooth Paul wrote the events. Paul would have been a great writer if his life had taken a literary turn instead of science. His book is beautifully written, timeless, philosophical, and heartbreaking. The fact that we read a dead person’s memoir is sad, adding up to that the metaphors Paul put into the book, and the poetic glimpses, as well as the deeply spiritual insight the book becomes angst, and gloomy.




The choice of this book came to me when I thought of how a lot of us can’t get over a breakup, or the death of someone either we know, or fictional characters. When The Fault In Our Stars, by John Green came out, the vast majority of readers felt deep attachment to Augustus and Hazel, and everybody felt heartbroken after ending the book, the characters always stay with us, deep down within all of us, they reminded us of people we lost for cancer or other terminal diseases, or in sudden car accidents, we still mourn for them, When Breath Becomes Air helps us both examine our own lives, and make our approach to mortality more graceful. It is a therapeutic book for the simple fact that it is a real discourse on a real people’s own private battle with cancer, and the existential weight.