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In “Nawal El Saadaoui. Collection of texts*”, Hafidha Chekir discusses the ideas and key texts of this psychiatrist and writer who since the 1950s was involved in the fight for the freedom of women in her country. She was a pillar of commitment to the dignity of women that has not failed to mark the Tunisian autonomous feminist movement since its appearance in the late 1970s.
Born in 1931 in a village North of Cairo, she was subject to genital mutilation at the age of six.
“It was in this great pain and humiliation that I became a feminist. It was not a choice, it was a survival instinct,” she used to say.
This event, which permeated her forever, also gave her the strength to conduct several campaigns to combat this scourge. As she stated: “It was a tool of oppression of women.” Her family tried to marry her the age of 10 and she fiercely opposed it. Her mother took her side. In 1981, she was sentenced to a three-month prison term in the jails of President Sadat for having criticized his law on the single party. In the 1990s, she experienced exile in the United States. Throughout several years, the persecution of religious dignitaries, who reproached her for inciting Arab women to live a fulfilling sexual life, never withered away.
When autobiography meets fiction
From her life, her encounters, her knowledge of Egyptian society but also her job as a rural doctor over a long period of time, she drew the material inspiring her writing, oscillating between autobiography and fiction. Her most emblematic works span time: Memoirs of a Woman Doctor (1958), Woman and Sex (1969), The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World (1977), The Veil (1978), Memoirs from the Women’s Prison (2002).
As quoted by Hafidha Chekir in the introduction to Memoirs from the Women’s Prison, a book written in prison on toilet paper using an eyebrow pencil given to her by a woman convicted of practicing “prostitution”, she claims that writing is the only weapon she disposes of to defend herself, her freedom and that of others.
“I will go on writing, I will keep on writing even if they bury me in a grave. I will go on writing even if they take away my pen and paper. I will write on the wall, on the surface of the earth, on the disc of the sun and on the face of the moon”
In 1981, the American magazine Time devoted its cover to her and named her one of its 100 most influential women of the year. Nawal El Saadawi has received countless marks of distinction throughout her long life, which have earned her a recurring comparison with Simone de Beauvoir.
“No, I don’t want to be identified with de Beauvoir!” she protested. She explains in an article from which Hafidha Chekir gleans a quote: “Simone de Beauvoir was jealous and obsessed with Sartre. I am much freer.”
Nudity and the veil
The issue of the veil and its opposite, namely nudity was among the ideas she defended and around which she built her feminist thought. Even if the psychiatrist opposes the wearing of the veil by affirming that this standard of the Islamists represents “a dangerous political symbol of the servitude of women. Why cover the woman’s head? The head of the woman is her honour and her dignity”, she also pinpoints the clothes that bare the body of the female gender. For her, in order to really live in an egalitarian society, nudity should be the prerogative of both women and men. Like the veil which, as they say, guards against the covetousness of men, men should also cover their heads.
“Men have sexual desires, but so do women. Why then not veil the men who women might desire?” she writes in her book “The Veil”.
For all her innovative ideas, Nawal El Saadawi has inspired many feminist movements, in the Arab world especially left-wing ones, including the Tunisian Association of Democratic Women – Association tunisienne des femmes démocrates (ATFD) founded in 1989, in the framework of which Hafidha Chekir continues to fight through her research and advocacy for more egalitarian and women-friendly laws. Among other things, Nawal El Saadawi has transmitted her conviction on the intersection between feminist struggles, the fight for democracy and commitment to human rights to the AFTD.
Quoted by Hafidha Chekir, the writer Fawzia Zouari in an article written in the newspaper Libération, testifies to the empathy that the Egyptian psychiatrist expressed for the women of the Arab world and the preponderant place that she occupied among the younger generations of the 1960s, 70s, 80s and 90s:
“When we had the chance to meet her, she challenged us bluntly, with this sentence in which we did not know how to disentangle curiosity from annoyance: “Who are you?” We introduced ourselves timidly. She then hugged us, making us stay by her side forever.”
