the hidden face of eve by nawal el saadawi

The Absent One (1969) featured the first female character in Arabic literature to suffer explicit sexual harassment.Īfter qualifying as a doctor in 1955 she developed a passion for health education, and came into conflict with the authorities. Her novel Memoirs of a Woman Doctor (1958) was followed by a number of short story collections. However, she could not abandon writing, nor controversy. In 1949 she entered Cairo University’s medical school – she was not interested in medicine, but her parents persuaded her that there was no future in studying literature. Unable to continue her education locally, El Saadawi was sent to Helwan school in Cairo, narrowly avoiding expulsion for writing a play on illegitimacy and for participating in nationalist demonstrations. But she also learned about political protest from her father, who was sent into internal exile for demonstrating against British rule. Female genital mutilation (FGM) was finally banned in Egypt in 2008. Her grandmother’s sexism – “a boy is worth 15 girls at least” – appalled her, and a clitorectomy at the age of six, described in The Hidden Face of Eve, prompted her campaign against the practice. She could not understand why, although academically gifted, she was praised only when she learned to light the kerosene stove. Nawal’s radicalism was shaped by experience. Love in the Kingdom of Oil (1993) uses a dreamscape narrative to examine a world in which, for a woman, husband and boss are interchangeable, and for a man, female self-determination is incomprehensible.īorn in Kafr Tahla, north of Cairo, the second of nine children, Nawal was the daughter of Zaynab (nee Shoukry), from an Ottoman Turkish family, and Al-Sayed El Saadawi, a teacher. Her best known novel in the west, Woman at Point Zero (1975), gives a horrifying account of childhood and marital abuse leading to prostitution. El Saadawi’s fiction is similarly concerned with social issues.

The hidden face of eve by nawal el saadawi