Amongst the ranks of Angela Davis (Women, Race, & Class), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Can the Subaltern Speak?), and bell hooks (Ain’t I a Woman?), Egyptian writer Nawal El Saadawi has comfortably cushioned herself as one of the most notable feminist activists and commentators of modern times.
In light of her passing on the evening of 21 March, women from all around the world moved by her courage and vivaciousness mourn together, sharing timeless excerpts of her literary work and snippets of her English and Arabic interviews to express the hollow space of the undoubtable icon has left behind.
Trained as a physician at Egypt’s esteemed Cairo University, Saadawi observed and recorded the physiological and psychological traumas inflicted unto the bodies of Egyptian women. In her seminal book, Women and Sex (1972), she proposed that such violence and oppression were rooted and justified in the cultural, sexual, and imperial framework of the national and global patriarchal regime.
As the country’s Ministry Director of Public Health and later a United Nations advisor for women of North Africa and the Middle East, Saadawi persevered against public shaming and controversy in her pursuit to enlighten others about the struggles and pain inflicted upon women as a victim of female genital mutilation herself (FGM).
Under Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, Saadawi’s outspoken and fearless disposition landed her in prison for treachery. She continued to publish her work from prison and speak on behalf of the men and women silenced by authoritarian and dictatorial regimes that deliberately flattened or erased any resistance. Her words inevitably gained traction through translations and publicity in foreign countries, making her a spokesperson on matters of race, gender, and colonization.
Even as a free woman speaking publicly at events hosted in the United States, she never shied away from the truth of her host’s warmongering policies that brutalized Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank or contributed to the escalating human rights violations in her homeland.
Moving from subconscious to conscious awareness of her predilection for rebellion, Saadawi has recorded a lifetime of wisdom and advice in over 40 books, translated in the same number of languages, that have influenced contemporaries and successors alike. Injustice left a bad taste in her mouth from adolescence and the rage she expressed on the platform she’d built for herself and those provided in literary and activist fields resonated with marginalized communities forced to shrink and cripple themselves at the hands of the powerful and the divine.
Up until her last breath, Saadawi laid bare her personal experiences and traumas in favor of the economic and social progression of women around the world. Perhaps her work will incite change and revolution posthumously as she had intended it to, encouraging women to take up their rightful places in the spaces they had been deprived of within the intersecting spheres of their class, religion, sex, ethnicities, and race.
What an honour it has been for Middle Eastern and North African women to have found a mouthpiece in somebody unapologetic in the ongoing battle for their right to dissent, to persist, and to exist; as Saadawi puts it in Walking Through Fire (2002), “if the price we pay for freedom is high, we pay a much higher price if we accept to be slaves.”