At nine she experienced terror when her periods began, as she did again, later in life, when they ended. At the age of six she underwent FGM, an operation sanctioned and watched over by her mother. These memoirs continue this tradition, counting out her life in a series of trials and betrayals. In her writing she has been a pioneer, exposing truths about her own life and the lives of other women that few before her had dared to utter in public. “She spoke the unspeakable”, Margaret Atwood thought.

“It was pen and paper that made me divorce two husbands”, she writes defiantly in one of many sentences that jump off the pages of this memoir like a raised fist.įrom the outset El Saadawi understood, as the Australian novelist, Christina Stead, once put it, that “to write is to fight”, and for women in a highly patriarchal society, this is doubly so. To deprive her of these vital tools, or to ban the writing that ensues from them – as politicians and clerics have tried throughout her life – has only roused her to action. As an adult she keeps them next to her bed, ready to dash down whatever ideas surface from her sleeping mind. As a child she hid them under her pillow at night, and as writing was always associated in her mind with death, she asked a teacher if she would find them waiting for her in Paradise – a question that led to her expulsion.

For El Saadawi, keeping pen and paper close to hand has been a lifelong habit. Her smuggled notes were published a few years later as Memoirs from the Women’s Prison, part of an extraordinary body of work from Egypt’s most prominent and longstanding dissident which includes memoirs, travelogues, novels, stories, plays and polemic. Despite this warning, in Walking Through Fire, the second volume of her autobiography, following Daughter of Isis (1999), El Saadawi describes how she managed to hide writing implements under the floor of the cell that she shared with twelve other women – an assortment of Marxists and prostitutes who had also fallen foul of Anwar Sadat’s regime. “If I find pen and paper, that is more dangerous than finding a gun”, an officer announced when Nawal El Saadawi was imprisoned in Al-Qanater jail in 1981 for “crimes against the state” (she had been running a feminist magazine).

Walking through fire nawal el saadawi