God Dies by the Nile and Other Novels (21 page)

Soon another question started to
flit through her
mind in a subdued whisper which became louder and louder. So in the middle of one night, the night after Galal had gone to gaol, Zeinab felt her Aunt Zakeya give her a violent nudge with her fist, as she lay on the mat beside her. When she looked into the old woman's eyes a shiver went through her spine. They were wide open and something terrible seemed to be going on inside them. She heard her whisper in a strange, hoarse voice, ‘Zeinab! Zeinab!'

She whispered back, ‘What's wrong, Aunt?'

‘I was blind, but now my eyes have been opened.'

‘You were never blind,' said Zeinab, shivering all over at the look in her aunt's eyes. ‘Your eyes were perfect. But tell me what's wrong?'

For a moment she thought that her aunt had fallen sick again. She clasped her hand and said, ‘Lie down, please lie down, Aunt. You are tired. Since they took Galal away you have not slept.'

But the fearsome look in her eyes was still there, almost like a madness, and her voice continued its hoarse whisper.

‘I know who it is. I know, Zeinab. I know.'

‘Who is it?' asked Zeinab at a loss, and still shivering all over.

‘It's Allah, Zeinab, it's Allah,' she said in a distant tone as though her mind had strayed far away.

Zeinab was now shaking violently all over. She took hold of her aunt's hand. It was as cold as ice.

‘Ask Allah to have mercy on you. Do your ablutions and pray, so that Allah may forgive us both, and have pity on us.'

‘Do not say that, Zeinab. You know nothing,' she cried out in sudden anger. ‘I am the one who knows.'

XXI

Zakeya continued to squat at the entrance to her house with her eyes wide open, staring steadily into the night. Now she never slept, or even closed her eyes. They pierced the darkness to the other side of the lane where rose the huge iron gate of the Mayor's house. She did not know exactly what she was waiting for. But as soon as she saw the blue eyes appear between the iron bars she stood up. She did not know why she stood up instead of continuing to squat, nor what she would do after that. But she walked to the stable and pushed the door open. In one of the corners she noticed the hoe. Her tall, thin body approached and bent over it. Her hand was rough and big, with a coarse skin, and it held the hoe in a firm grip as her big, flat feet walked out of the door. She paused for a moment then crossed the lane to the iron gate. The Mayor saw her come towards him. ‘One of the peasant women who work on my farm,' he thought. When he came close he saw her arm rise high up in the air holding the hoe.

He did not feel the hoe land on his head and crush it at one blow. For a moment before, he had looked into her eyes, just once. And from that moment he was destined never to see, or feel, or know anything more.

XXII

The grey van advanced over the road with Zakeya squatting inside just as she used to squat at the entrance to her house. It sped along streets and roads she had never seen before, or even realized could exist. It was a different world to the world she had known. From a crack in the wood covering the window she could see a river, like the Nile in Kafr El Teen, but to her it did not look like the Nile. The van stopped in front of a huge door. She walked surrounded by the men who had brought her. Around her wrists they had put handcuffs but her large black eyes were wide open. Her lips were tightly closed as though she did not want to say anything, or could not remember words any longer. But every now and then the men around her could see her mutter, like someone talking to herself. She kept repeating in a low voice, ‘I know who it is. Now I know him.' In the middle of the night, as she lay on the floor of her cell near the other women prisoners, her lids would remain wide open. She stared into the dark with open eyes but her lips were always tightly closed. But one of the prisoners heard her mutter in a low voice, ‘I know who it is.' And the woman asked her curiously, ‘Who is it, my dear?'

And Zakeya answered, ‘I know it's Allah, my child.'

‘Where is He?' sighed her companion. ‘If He were here, we could pray Him to have mercy on women like us.'

‘He's over there, my child. I buried him there on the bank of the Nile.'

SEARCHING

 

NAWAL EL SAADAWI

TRANSLATED BY SHIRLEY EBER
FOREWORD BY ANASTASIA VALASSOPOULOS

FOREWORD

Rawness. Reading
Searching
again, in light of a growing body of work in the Arab world on gender, feminism and social change, is like taking a look at this body from the inside out and seeing it in its raw state. The personal and the political, the body and its context, are constantly in strife, in communication with each other, in tension. Nawal El Saadawi's writing appears affective and effective still. Affective because we, as astute readers, are not permitted to stand still and form tidy conclusions; effective still because the historical context is deliberately unspecified, thus discouraging a located reading that would seek to ground the events in the novel and to explain away the profound questions asked.

Searching
tells the story of a young woman, Fouada, who becomes conscious of her life choices after the man she loves disappears. This disruption ignites an intense self-interrogation into the various subjectivities that she inhabits – her role as daughter, as professional, as lover, as human, all come under fire as she roams the streets of Cairo looking for a sign that her life is meaningful, that it does have value and that freedom is a human and humane quality.

Cairo itself is a character in this novel – Fouada walks through the streets, the squares, the restaurants and looks at the buildings and the landscape. What is her role in all this, she wonders. Saadawi convincingly and cinematically draws us in from these wide panoramic scenes into the inner corporeality of Fouada where sensation is embroiled with thought – where the body must try to understand its materiality. Nawal El Saadawi, a well-known activist for women's rights, is also a well-known physician and her interest in the body and its functioning is never far from her creative writing. Pain and suffering are, for Saadawi, first and foremost an assault on the boundedness of the body; on its ability to maintain an order or justice of sorts (one not found in the relations sought outside of it). It is not accidental that our first encounter with Fouada is of her painstakingly examining her sensations; she looks at her face in the mirror and wonders how this face reflects her emotional state. The novel abounds with scenes that move between the constructed reality and order of the outside world and the equally distressing confusion over how the body can react to this reality.

As a writer primarily interested in social circumstances and social consequence, Saadawi has never spent unnecessary time on scene setting and introductory commentary in relation to her storylines or characters – her narration cuts to the quick, to the heart of the matter, and maintains this searching towards a clarity of sorts (I am thinking here of
novels such as
Woman at Point Zero
,
Two Women in One
and
Memoirs of a Woman Doctor
). Though she is often described as an author who has not always sought aesthetics over social realism, I find Saadawi's brand of realism a journey into aesthetics itself – a questioning of what type of aesthetics would suit the often poignant circumstances of which she writes. Her deft movement between the internal and the external is an aestheticization of space; of how space can be made knowledgeable and of how external circumstances affect the ability of the body to understand itself and vice versa. Take this scene as an example:

One of millions, one of those human bodies, crowding the streets, the buses, the cars and the houses. Who was she? Fouada Khalil Salim, born in Upper Egypt, identity card number 3125098. What would happen to the world if she fell under the wheels of a bus? Nothing. Life would go on, indifferent and unconcerned … She looked around in surprise. But why surprise? She really was one of millions … What was so astonishing about that? But it still surprised her, amazed her, something she could neither believe nor accept.

Here, Fouada, and in turn the reader, is being asked to look beyond the bleak overarching reality of Fouada's surroundings and to look instead into the complexity located within the
mind that seeks a validation of individuality. This is a constant theme in the novel. Fouada looks with wonder at her name on a hoarding advertising her chemistry lab and shudders ‘as though what she read was the notice of her own death'. Sinking deeper into what she calls depression, Fouada experiences a disjointed reality. The searching of the title appears to indicate a searching for words that do not yet exist to encapsulate or describe the variety of unfulfilled desires. In other words, Saadawi seeks to uncover the systems of power that forestall or even prohibit the imagining of another social world – the one that Fouada seeks that is bolstered by a strong sense of social justice. The presence of other characters in the novel – the minister and landlord, her mother, her absent lover – though not always densely portrayed, certainly work to illustrate convincingly how ideology functions. All the characters are a product of the various ideological systems that have produced them and that they in turn feed and produce. Everyone is a victim and a beneficiary of the particular social system – nothing is clear because the way that power functions is not always clear. Fouada ponders these issues through self-reflection:

She stopped abruptly to ask: But what are feelings? Could she touch them? Could she see them? Could she smell them? Could she put them in a test tube and analyse them? … She looked around, confused. Were feelings true or false? Why when she looked into Farid's eyes did
she feel that he was familiar, and when she looked into Saati's eyes feel that he was a thief? Was that illusion or knowledge? Was it a random movement in the optic nerve or a conscious movement in the brain cells? How could she distinguish between the two?

Saadawi is perceptive to centralize the complexity of the individual, thus forestalling the rather simplistic connection between a villainous society and a central victimized character. Here, knowledge itself is under scrutiny. How do we recognize knowledge and its function? In relation to ourselves, Saadawi seems to be saying; in relation to our desires and needs. How do ideologies gain strength? In relation to others' needs and desires. It is the tension caused by the differences in these desires and the power behind the ideologies that furthermore complicate a fixed notion of social justice. Fouada's mother has dreams that remain unfulfilled; the minister Saati who tries to exploit her has dreams that have been crushed; Fouada has desires that are not compatible with anyone else's, including her lover's whose first love is politics and the pursuit of yet another brand of social justice. Restriction is experienced in many different ways – through gender, through sexuality, through poverty, through political beliefs. I do not intend to undermine the political context that Saadawi is undeniably writing in, that of a restrictive regime that supports corruption, imprisons alternative voices and often turns a blind eye to the
shameless denigration of human dignity. Yet Saadawi's novel is neither bound nor restricted by this. Instead, through the use of an often dreamlike quality of internal dialogue, disjointed perceptions and incomplete communications, Saadawi constructs a narrative that powerfully performs a searching of sorts; the search for a voice beyond contextual specificity.

It is tempting to assign an overarching ideology to each of the characters, be it Marxist, neo-capitalist, traditionalist, or whatever, but this would take away from the ways in which Saadawi suggests both the reducibility and the irreducibility of each of the characters into these ideologies, with Fouada orbiting them as a lost soul searching for her way. In many ways, the novel is relevant for readers today as it seeks to transmit frustration and disappointment and to remove the illusion that knowledge is always power. Fouada, for all her insights and knowledge, gives in to the man who most disgusts her. Unable to find a convincing voice with which to express her confusion and her desires, she drifts into Saati's arms like a sleepwalker. However, the novel is keen to remind us of the flitting moments of self-definition, of self-worth, even after it seems that nothing is left.

Searching
appears to gesture towards a searching for paradigms within which to understand one's place in the world, how to define and achieve social justice and social equality. Yes, the book is about oppression, but oppression in its many forms – economic, gendered and sexual. Everyone in the novel
has a story, a narrative of fear, ambition and disappointment. Through prioritizing Fouada's story, though, Saadawi does make us sensitive to the particular corporeal experience of fear often located in women's narratives. Ultimately, this corporeal fear is nourished by the social uncertainties and confusions that surround Fouada – her place in the world is unclear and her attempt to locate a place within it is filled with uncertainty. Saadawi's text prioritizes this vagueness of searching – a searching that will not necessarily know when it has reached its goal because it does not have the necessary tools to imagine its goal.

I have argued elsewhere on the need to participate in a text's gesturing towards its own construction as a global or universal product. In
Searching
, Saadawi achieves this through the seemingly indisputable language of science – of chemistry. Nevertheless, her achievement is to expand the utility of science beyond its immediate usage and to turn it into a means through which a philosophy of life and society can be measured. In her book
Men, Women and God(s): Nawal El Saadawi and Arab Feminist Poetics
, Fedwa Malti-Douglas argues that Saadawi gains authority through her double role as physician and writer and through contesting the notion of ‘natural gender inequality'. Though a physician herself, Saadawi ‘denudes medicine and science of part of their magical technological power'. Malti-Douglas argues that in fact medicine becomes ‘a repository of [negative] social power' for Saadawi. However,
I would like to suggest that in
Searching
, Saadawi posits an uncertainty, rather than a negative position, vis-à-vis the certainty of science. Specifically, Fouada's love of science also represents a love of freedom and creativity. At one of the most poignant moments in the novel,