The Essential Nawal El Saadawi


Book Description

The writings of Nawal El Saadawi are essential to anyone wishing to understand the contemporary Arab world. Her dissident voice has stayed as consistent in its critique of neo.imperialist international politics as it has in its denunciation of women's oppression, both in her native Egypt and in the wider world. Saadawi is a figure of international significance, and her work has a central place in Arabic history and culture of the last half century. Featuring work never before translated into English, The Essential Nawal El Saadawi gathers together a wide range of Saadawi's writing. From novellas and short stories to essays on politics, culture, religion and sex; from extensive interviews to her work as a dramatist; from poetry to autobiography, this book is essential for anyone wishing to gain a sense of the breadth of Saadawi's work.




Woman at Point Zero


Book Description

So begins Firdaus' story, leading to her grimy Cairo prison cell, where she welcomes her death sentence as a relief from her pain and suffering. Born to a peasant family in the Egyptian countryside, Firdaus suffers a childhood of cruelty and neglect. Her passion for education is ignored by her family, and on leaving school she is forced to marry a much older man. Following her escapes from violent relationships, she finally meets Sharifa who tells her that 'A man does not know a woman's value ... the higher you price yourself the more he will realise what you are really worth' and leads her into a life of prostitution. Desperate and alone, she takes drastic action. -- Publisher description.




The Nawal El Saadawi Reader


Book Description

This collection portrays the intellectual and political development of an extraordinary thinker who explores a host of topics including women's oppression under recent interpretations of Islam and the subversive potential of creativity.




Walking Through Fire


Book Description

Famous for her novels, short stories and writings on women, Saadawi is known as the first Arab woman to write about sex and its relation to economics and politics. Imprisoned under Sadat for her opinions, she has continued to fight against all forms of discrimination based on class, gender, nation, race or religion. In In a Daughter of Isis, she painted a portrait of the childhood that moulded her into a novelist and fighter for freedom and the rights of women. This autobiography takes up the story of her extraordinary life.




A Daughter of Isis


Book Description

Nawal El Saadawi has been pilloried, censored, imprisoned and exiled for her refusal to accept the oppressions imposed on women by gender and class. In her life and in her writings, this struggle against sexual discrimination has always been linked to a struggle against all forms of oppression: religious, racial, colonial and neo-colonial. In 1969, she published her first work of non-fiction, Women and Sex ; in 1972, her writings and her struggles led to her dismissal from her job. From then on there was no respite; imprisonment under Sadat in 1981 was the culmination of the long war she had fought for Egyptian women's social and intellectual freedom. A Daughter of Isis is the autobiography of this extraordinary woman.




Memoirs from the Women's Prison


Book Description

"If Kafka had been a feminist, his prisoner might have had Nawal el Sa'adawi's feistiness, maybe, like her, he would have hoed a prison garden, led veiled and unveiled cellmates in rebellious calisthenics, strategized with a murderess to foil state illogic. This book gives me hope, even makes me laugh."—Cynthia Enloe, author of The Morning After




Memoirs of a Woman Doctor


Book Description

A young Egyptian woman clashes with her traditional family when she chooses a career in medicine. Rather than submit to an arranged marriage and motherhood, she cuts her hair short and works fiercely to realise her dreams. At medical school, she begins to understand the mysteries of the human body. After years of denying her own desires, the doctor begins a series of love affairs that allow her to explore her sexuality – on her own terms.




God Dies by the Nile


Book Description

Nawal el Saadawi's classic tale attempts to square Islam with a society in which women are respected as equals is as relevant today as ever. 'People have become corrupt everywhere. You can search in vain for Islam, or a devout Muslim. They no longer exist.' Kafr El Teen is a beautiful, sleepy village on the banks of the Nile. Yet at its heart it is tyrannical and corrupt. The Mayor, Sheikh Hamzawi of the mosque, and the Chief of the Village Guard are obsessed by wealth and use and abuse the women of the village, taking them as slaves, marrying them and beating them. Resistance, it seems, is futile. Zakeya, an ordinary villager, works in the fields by the Nile and watches the world, squatting in the dusty entrance to her house, quietly accepting her fate. It is only when her nieces fall prey to the Mayor that Zakeya becomes enraged by the injustice of her society and possessed by demons. Where is the loving and peaceful God in whom Zakeya believes?"




The Novel


Book Description

“The novel caused tremendous outrage.” So begins Nawal El Saadawi’s tenth novel. And indeed, when the famous Egyptian psychiatrist and writer released The Novel in 2005, it was banned all over the Arab world. But the novel inside The Novel is by a young woman—a woman who is only 23 years old, who has “no family, no university degree, no national identity card,” whose name does not appear on this “lists of prominent women writers.” A woman, that is, whose biography is as unlike Saadawi’s own as possible, as if she has stripped herself of all the effects of her own worldly existence to explore something earlier, more elemental, than the political work for which she is so well known. In following the life of this young, unnamed, woman writer as it intersects with those of a famous writer named Rostum, his wife Carmen, and a poet called Miriam, El Saadawi gives us a deeply felt exploration of the nature of identity, of fame, of writing, and of freedom.




Zeina


Book Description

New edition of classic novel about motherhood and resilience, set against the backdrop of revolution in Egypt, by the leading Arab feminist writer