Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

A Much-Needed Voice of Resistance

2022; Indiana University Press; Volume: 18; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/15525864-9494304

1558-9579

Évelyne Accad,

Islamic Studies and History

It gives me great pleasure to honor Nawal El Saadawi, who has been such an inspiration and a role model in my life. My awareness of the numerous challenges that Arab women face grew from Nawal’s prolific work.I had left my country of birth—Lebanon—to escape the plight of my Arab sisters and to find out who I was away from the restrictions I had experienced as an adolescent. It was in the United States that I discovered Simone de Beauvoir, who opened my eyes to the plight of women all over the world. She inspired me to commit my research and writing to women’s issues and more specifically to Arab women’s problems. But it was Nawal El Saadawi who forced me to examine my own dilemmas and concerns. She was writing about the problems women in my part of the world were facing. Hers was the outspoken, eloquent voice of resistance I needed. It helped me address and analyze what had troubled me for so long that I needed to run away to discover it.I didn’t know it at the time, but when in 1972 I started writing my first novel, L’excisée, about the physical and metaphorical excision of women, Nawal was publishing Woman and Sex. She denounced genital mutilation (to which she had been subjected), polygamy, beatings, lack of freedom of all kinds. The book became a foundational text of second-wave feminism. Because of her revolutionary book and ideas, she was dismissed from her job at the Ministry of Health. Her book was banned, and she left Egypt for a while to come to Lebanon, where she worked at the UN Relief and Works Agency. Her books were reprinted and became best sellers throughout the Arab world.When I began my career as a young professor at the University of Illinois, I included Nawal’s books in my teaching. In 1983 I organized a conference on gender and Third World women at Illinois and invited Nawal to be the keynote speaker. She had just been released from prison and was suffering from back pain, but she gladly agreed to come and talk to us. Her amazing presence electrified us all, giving us that push to get more organized to bring on change. The event was my first encounter with her, the beginning of a long friendship in which we wrote each other to encourage each other when we were dispirited.While she was still with us in Champaign, I interviewed her about excision. Here is an excerpt from that 1983 interview: NES: Clitoridectomy is still practiced in villages. In my village, where I go once a month, they still want all the girls to be excised. In cities, in Cairo, it’s different.EA: Because of the law?NES: No, there’s no law. There’s something like a directive from the Ministry of Health that states that the circumcision of girls must not be practiced, while that of boys may be. But it’s not enforced. Any doctor may practice excision, and no one will punish them. As for the daiahs, the village midwives, they are practicing excision night and day.EA: Have you asked women if it has deprived them of orgasm?NES: No, no! This is what the women in my village told me last month: young girls want excision! The daiah said to me: they run to me and ask me for it. Social pressure is great. I remember, however, when I was young, before they did it to me, I was waiting for it, I desired it. Not desire. . . . I think it was a particular experience that I had to acquire, something like a baptism. Something had to occur, to arrive in the world, just as the sun rises in the East and sets in the West. When it happened and I was healed, I was happy to overcome this trial. I had taken the test, you understand, I had passed it with success.EA: When were you then conscious of what it was? What made you aware of it?NES: I obtained my medical license, I left medical school without knowing it was a mutilation. At medical school, no one talked to us about the clitoris. And in no medical school is anything taught about the clitoris, its function. Nowhere!EA: Even foreign doctors?NES: Even in America, even in Europe. If you open books on anatomy, on physiology, they never say anything about the clitoris. As if the clitoris did not exist! They discuss the uterus because medicine sees women as reproductive bodies and not as sexual beings. That’s why we have no sexologists. We have gynecologists, obstetricians, but no sexologists! And so, I became a doctor without knowing anything about the clitoris, its function, the harmful effects of clitoridectomy. Finally, I began to read. It was like coming to feminism. It was like becoming conscious. While I worked as a doctor in the villages and young girls covered in blood came to see me, I started asking myself questions. What’s this? Is it bleeding or an infection? And when a little girl died in my arms because she had lost blood after excision, I started to think: What is this? It’s ridiculous. What’s happening? Why cut, why open this? And I began asking questions and reading books of sociology and religion. I discovered how religion had been twisted. My father was pious, like all my family, and when I was younger, I was in the habit of saying prayers, of fasting. I was raised in a religious atmosphere. But when I was in medical school, I began to reflect. I discovered what religion really was. I asked myself, why was God male and all the prophets male? And I began to read the history of ancient Egypt, about Isis and other goddesses. I had the feeling that another world was opening up. I felt that until then I had been blind and that my eyes suddenly could see. And I read more and more. . . . EA: You became conscious. And did you also become conscious of your body?NES: It was a mix. My body, for me, means many things. In the villages, as a doctor, I saw little girls die from excision, when I was in the presence of poverty, when I felt that medicine was useless, and I started to think about society. Why did people become ill? Why were they poor, why were they hungry? I realized that they were sick because they were hungry, through a lack of hygiene, because of poverty, the harsh labor, exploitation, etc. The oppression of women was linked to all forms of societal oppression. Poverty, medicine, working in villages around the sick helped me to understand that we were living in a very unjust society.EA: You remember, Nawal, during the conference one of the great debates was that hunger and poverty were more immediate than sexuality. What do you think about this?NES: It’s artificial! We can’t separate the bottom from the top of the body. You can’t separate the head and the penis, or the head and the clitoris and say, oh! Don’t worry about the clitoris, don’t worry about the penis, don’t worry about sexuality, we’re thinking about the head! Or rather don’t worry about that, we’re thinking about the stomach! We have to fill the stomach, then we’ll think about sexuality! It’s a very artificial discussion because it implies that these people have other needs. That’s why I belong to no group, because when I go to meetings, especially those of the Left in Egypt, they spend all their time classifying: hunger, poverty first. They don’t talk about women and sexuality. Human beings are human beings and not just stomachs. They are stomachs and brains, and they have penises and clitorises. Those who want to change the world must first change themselves. Of course, hunger and poverty are very serious questions, especially in our societies, in the Third World, in Egypt, in Arab countries . . . and sometimes we are ashamed to speak of sexuality when people are hungry—and when there is no drinking water and no electricity—essential needs. When essential needs are missing from villages and cities, to talk of sexuality is like a luxury. However, I think that in each case, each class has different priorities. And if I have food and I eat, then I must think about love, about sexuality, and it’s my right. It’s my right to have enough to eat, to benefit from the city, to make love and to love. Food deprivation is terrible, and deprivation of sexual pleasure, of love, of a healthy life, of a normal life, is also terrible. What can we do about this? Where are the priorities? Yours are different from mine. Everyone must be considered in concrete terms, in their society, within their environment.That interview changed my life. I came to the realization that it was my feeling of injustice, hurt, and pain that had led me to run away from my condition of being woman in Lebanon. We met again on various occasions. I remember a special time at La Fête de l’Humanité in Paris. It was a rainy day, and we had both given talks about women’s issues. Nawal was signing her books, and I was singing. We laughed a lot and shared in our activism with a sense of deep sisterhood. After that evening, whenever Nawal knew I was coming to a conference, she would ask me to bring my guitar and sing. So I close this tribute with a song that I dedicate to Nawal, this remarkable woman and friend, without whom I feel a great loss now that she has left us.Resist, resist, resistFor all of us resistFor the rest of the world, resistKawmi, Nawal Kawmi [Arabic]Likuluna kawmiLil alam kuluhu, kawmiDiren [Turkish] Lawan [Malaysian, Indonesian]Makibaka [Filipino] Jaago [Urdu]Mobarese [Iranian]Résiste, résiste, résistePour tous les peuples, résistePour transformer le monde, résiste!