Presentation by Nawal El Saadawi: President's Forum, M/MLA Annual Convention, November 4, 1999 Nawal El Saadawi The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Vol. 33, No. 3. (Autumn, 2000 - Winter, 2001), pp. 34-39. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0742-5562%28200023%2f200124%2933%3a3%3c34%3apbnesp%3e2.0.co%3b2-0 The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association is currently published by Midwest Modern Language Association. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/mmla.html. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. http://www.jstor.org Sat Oct 27 01:04:47 2007
Presentation by Nawal El Saadawi President's Forum, MIMLA Annual Convention, November 4, 1999 Narrator, essayist, dramatist, memoirist, psychiatrist, and activist, Nawal El Saadawi is the Founder and President of the Arab Women's Solidarity Association (1982-present), Co-Founder of the Arab Association for Human Rights (1983-7), and the Founder of the Egyptian Women Writers' Association (1971). She has been visiting professor at Duke University, University of Washington, University of Illinois at Chicago, and most recently, Florida Atlantic University. Among her publications are the novels, Woman at Point Zero (1973) and Love in the Kingdom of Oil (1993); the shortstory collections, The Thread and the Wall (1972) and Death of an Ex-minister (1978); the plays, Twelve Women in a Cell (1984) and God Resigns in the Summit Meeting (1996); the memoirs, Memoirs in a Women's Prison (1983) and the two-volume autobiography, My Life, Part I(1996) and My Life, Part I1 (1998); as well as the non-fiction works, Women and Sex (1969), Men and Sex (1973) and The Naked Face of Arab Women (1974). Rather than reading from her work, El Saadawi chose to address the audience on the subject of creativity and its relationship to bearing witness. Listening to poetry I really wonder if our politicians read poetry and listen to poetry to make our world a better place. That is one of the major problems in our world today-politicians and the people who decide our lives don't read poetry and don't listen to poetry. They even ignore writers and novelists and look at us as if we were just doing nonsense. When I got here I was really exhausted, but when I listened to my friends' poetry tonight, I was suddenly filled with inner energy. Some inner energy comes to us when we listen to poetry and music-the music of the language. That's the problem with translations: you can't translate music. Just now, I listened to poetry in two different languages, and each language had its meaning. You cannot separate the word from its meaning. You cannot separate form and content. You cannot separate body and spirit and mind. I write in Arabic. That's my mother tongue. I wish I could speak to all of you in Arabic right now, but of course you would not understand me. When I read my books in English, they are not my books in Arabic. At least 30% of the meaning is different-the spirit, the music-all that is lost. And the same happens when I read the holy books, 34 Presentation by Nawal El Saadawi
whether the Koran or the Old Testament, in English. The Old Testament was written in Hebrew and the Koran in Arabic, and when I read them in translation, they are different books with different meanings. I wonder why God did not know how to write his books in all languages. He was only bilingual. This brings me to my problem with God-a problem that began when I was a child-because my problem with God is intimately related to creativity. When I was a child, I felt that there were a lot of contradictions and paradoxes in my life. I had a brother who was one year older than me, but because he was a boy, a male, he was spoiled, even worshiped. My parents were very happy when he was born. When I was born nobody smiled. I was very good in school because I wanted to tell my father and my mother that I was as intelligent as my brother. While my brother was very lazy, I worked very hard and succeeded year after year, passing my examinations and achieving many merits. Yet he was rewarded for his failure with playing outside in the street and bicycling and getting a bigger piece of meat than me, despite the fact that he didn't work hard in school. I was rewarded for my success by working in the kitchen with my mother. This contradiction hurt me very much. I went and asked my parents to explain it, "Why is this happening?" And they said, "Because he's a boy and you're a girl." Still I repeated, "But why?" "Because that's what God said," they replied. That was the first time I heard the word "God," and I thought to myself but how can this be? God is justice! You see, I was brought up in a village. My grandmother was a peasant. When I was five years old, she said to the mayor, "God is justice. And we know God by our mind." She didn't read the Koran because she was illiterate, but somehow she understood that God was justice. I had learned that lesson from her, so I asked myself then, Why is he unjust? So the first letter I wrote in my life was a letter to God. I said to him, "God, you are supposed to be just, so why are you unjust? I'm not ready to believe in you unless you are just." Of course the letter never reached him-i didn't know his address-but I never forgot that experience. It stayed in my memory, and when I started writing my autobiography, all my childhood came back. I was about sixty when I finally wrote my autobiography. I was living in exile at Duke University at that time. I was forced to leave my country because I had challenged the fundamentalist groups and the government. My name was put on the death list in Egypt; security guards surrounded my house; I had to have a bodyguard to protect my life, and I felt that death was near. When you feel that death is very near, something happens; new power comes to you. So I felt that I had to write my life. Why? Why do we think of writing our life? I think that each one of you has this Nawal El Saadawi 35
feeling. I asked one of my friends, "Why don't you write your life, your autobiography?" She said, "But there is nothing important in my life. Why should I write?" I told her that what she said was not true, that every life is important. If we really realized that every life is important, every experience has its own unique life, we would all write our autobiography. We are all born creative, but we lose our creativity through education, through oppression, through inhibitions, because of fear of God, fear of hellfire after death, fear of punishment. The result is that we lose our creativity. We lose trust in the self, we lose confidence. That's why we don't create, for to create you must have trust in yourself, you must believe that you have something to say. I feel all the time that I have something to say to you. That's why I chose not to read tonight from my work but to talk to you instead. My books are on display here behind me. When I write a book, I never want to see it again. It's in the past, and the pleasure of creativity is something related to the present. When I write a novel, I say, "I'm writing a novel." And I feel pleasure. But I can't say," I have written a novel," because it has no meaning for me. There is no pleasure in that because creativity is related to the present. "I'm writing a novel. I'm writing my life." I tell you this because usually when I talk about creativity to people they think that we writers are all unique, geniuses, different from them-and this has no meaning for me. I want all of you to feel that you are creative and can realize your creativity-through painting, writing, music, creativity in science, in medicine, in everything. We are all creative but we lose our childhood confidence and that's why we don't create. The second thing I would like to talk to you about tonight is what it means to be a woman, a female artist in a closed male society. I was born in a village in a poor family, but deep inside me, I always felt that I would do something in life and I don't know where that confidence came from. Maybe my mother. I remember that when I was seven years old, my mother said, "If we put Nawal in fire, she will come back unhurt." So I surely got my confidence from my mother. Mothers are very important. So are fathers, but the relationship between mother and daughter is even more crucial, for a mother can destroy the creativity of her daughter. In my autobiography you can feel how important my mother was to my development as a woman and as an artist. You see, my mother gave me the confidence to feel that I was complete. The feeling that as women we are incomplete is imbedded in philosophy, in religion, in politics and in economics. Women are thought to be bodies without a head, an idea that can be found in Judaism, in Christianity and in Islam. This is the origin of veiling. Why do women put on a veil? Why do they cover their head? Because philosophy tells us that women are bodies without heads. When women marry, their husbands becomes their head. That is why a woman 36 Presentation by Nawal El Saadawi
should be ashamed of her incomplete nature. Therefore she should hide her head. In one of my books I asked, "How can she hide something she doesn't have?" The veiling of the head is destructive, but mental veiling is worse and the mental veil is universal. We are all veiled somehow, both men and women-by education, by the media, by politicians-but women are more veiled. Creativity is related to the process of constantly unveiling our mind. Here is a story I like to tell. I was at a conference like this one, with women from different countries. A Saudi Arabian woman sat with her face covered with the physical, religious veil, and beside her was a French woman with such a thick coating of make-up on that you couldn't see her face. The French woman looked down on the Saudi Arabian woman saying, "Look at this backward woman with her face veiled." But I said to her, "Look, you have your face veiled, too." (We could call it a postmodern veil.) All women whether they live in the West or in the East wear a veil. They try to hide their age with make-up, the color of their skin if they are brown. For instance, when I was young my aunt tried to push me into putting white powder on my face to cover my brown skin. Women cover their wrinkles with make-up, with face-lifts, with plastic surgery. Usually I say that plastic surgery is like female circumcision or clitoridectomy. You cut away part of the body. Veiling is an obstacle to creativity. Since childhood we are veiled by our parents and by our schools. We cannot ask questions that are very important to our creativity and open our minds. I remember when I was a child, I used to look at the sky and then see the stars. So one day I said to my father, "Oh, look, the stars are beautiful. Who created those stars?" And he told me that God did. So the next natural question was, "Who created God?" He replied, "No, no, no, no! Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!" But this is the question that opened up the world to scientific knowledge and discovery-in physics, biology, chemistry, medicine, in everything. Yet we are silenced. We stop questioning; and when we stop questioning we don't create. Creativity is questioning all the time and trying to solve paradoxes, the attempt to uncover the hidden. That's why creative people are so curious. Not only do we lose our creativity; we lose our curiosity because we are afraid to ask. Why do we write? God wrote books also. If there were no holy books, Moses would be forgotten, Mohammed would be forgotten and Christ would be forgotten. But because we have the three holy books, we remember them. This is why we create. We do not want to die; we want to live eternally. Creativity means to overcome death. This was the source of the conflict between God and Adam and Eve. Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge and then God was jealous and said to himself, "Now Nawal El Saadawi 37
she will be as knowledgeable as the gods. If she eats from the Tree of Knowledge she will live eternally like us." And God punished her for that. For writing enables us to challenge God. It is a challenge to the power either in Heaven or on earth. Creativity empowers us. I didn't fully understand the importance, the power of creativity until I went to prison. When I was in prison, we were forbidden to have paper and pens. Every day the jailor came to inspect our cells and look for paper and pens. Every day he told me, "If I find paper and pen in your cell, it's more dangerous than finding a gun." How are paper and pen more dangerous to an oppressive political system than guns? That was what made me decide to write. The prostitutes' cell was near us, and there was a young prostitute who came to my cell every day with the jailor to bring us bread. She smuggled toilet paper and an eyebrow pencil she used to make-up with into my cell. I hid them in a tin can and put the can under the ground. This way I was able to write an entire book-my memoirs-in prison, on toilet paper, with an eyebrow pencil. Every day the jailor came to inspect my entire cell, but he never found my memoirs. I would also like to say that creativity brings pleasure. When you know the pleasure of creativity, you are willing to pay with your life to continue feeling it. I'm ready to pay with my life to continue writing. In fact, I divorced my second husband because of writing. He came to me one day and said that he was upset by my short stories and novels and everything else I wrote. He didn't like my writing because it embarrassed him. He was a man of law, a judge. I remember he said to me, "Nawal, you have to choose between me or your writing." I thought for a moment and said, "My writing." I'm a very angry woman. I think that creativity means that we express our anger outside ourselves. When men and women are angry, they hide their anger because of fear, for if you are angry, you will be punished. Yet anger is a natural phenomenon. When you see injustices, when you find that the majority of people in our region are dying because of hunger; when you find war, unjust war, and people being killed, then you are angry. When you are treated very unjustly, you become angry. If you repress your anger and direct it against yourself, it ruins you and it ruins your creativity. When you direct your anger outwards in a creative action, however, it saves you. It gives you a lot of pleasure, and that pleasure can make you very powerful. You can challenge the world because you have pleasure in life. When I sit writing, I feel pleasure. More than sex, more than anything. You feel that something, your inner voice, is coming out and you are living, really living at that moment in the here and now. You are not in the past, you are not in the future; in fact, creativity brings the past and the future together to this present moment that you are living. 38 Presentation by Nawal El Saadawi
I would like to end by saying that creativity is a very simple act. It's easy. Sometimes people come to me and say, "Oh, how can you write a novel. It's difficult!" It's not difficult at all. It's like breathing. It's very natural, but because of loss of confidence, we think it is difficult. It's very easy. You can play music, you can write, you can paint. Just trust yourself. Feel that you can do it. Then do it. Trust that your life is important. This is the crucial part. Creativity has no mystery. It's natural. Like breathing. My original profession was a doctor. I hated being a doctor. I hated the profession. I became a medical doctor to satisfy my parents. Now I'm a psychiatrist. I hate psychiatry, too. In fact, I hate everything once it becomes a profession. Even writing. When my publisher calls and says, "Nawal, why don't you write a book about your experiences as a psychiatrist, I cannot write it. Because writing is connected to freedom. You cannot create unless you love and want to do it. Nobody can tell you to write. If someone tells you that you have to be creative, you have to write a play, you will never do it. You have to do it yourself. Thank you very much! Nawal El Saadawi 39