God Dies by the Nile and Other Novels (37 page)

Hamida steals a piece of candy, which she sucks as she lies in bed. The store-owner chases her and rapes her. This violation sets the narrative into motion as first the mother suspects that the blood she sees on her young daughter's clothing signals menstruation. But when Hamida's belly grows in size, the mother understands that the blood represents something else. She sends her daughter away on a train. This first rape, caused by a stolen piece of candy, is followed by a second rape, this one in the city where Hamida arrives by train. Impelled by hunger she grabs some bread, and this stolen food leads to her second rape, this time by ‘the government'. When Hamida is raped a third time, she is a servant assaulted by her master because she has eaten a small piece of meat.

The confluence of eating and rape brings us into the universe of the corporal as it intersects with the political (the second rape) and the social (the third rape). The coming together of these three elements is not unusual in Saadawi's fiction.

We see the identical confluence, but with a clear religious component added, in
Woman at Point Zero
, where the doctor narrator is entranced by an imprisoned prostitute's narrative. The prostitute, Firdaus, we learn, was also raped, by her uncle, a traditionally educated man. She is then married to a much older religious man. A miser, he beats his wife because he has found a
piece of food in the garbage. She runs away to an uncle's house where she is informed that men, especially religious ones, beat their wives. She escapes, but this time into prostitution.

As
The Circling Song
's Hamida exits the train in the city, her brother, Hamido, is boarding a train at the instigation of his father, who declares to him that ‘only blood washes out shame' – the blood being, of course, female.

In another Saadawian tale, a short story entitled ‘A Story from a Woman Doctor's Life', a third-person narrator introduces the text: ‘Dr S. wrote in her diary.' Dr S. in this unusual framing proceeds to recount the story. A young girl is sitting in her clinic, flanked by a tall young man, her brother. The brother entreats the doctor to examine his sister, wishing to reassure himself about her, ‘since we are marrying her off to her cousin next week'. The girl cuts her brother off, insisting that she does not love this man and does not wish to marry him. The brother, however, responds that she does not want to marry him for ‘another reason, Doctor… I think you understand', a clear allusion to the possibility of her having lost her virginity.

Observing the fright in the young girl's eyes, the doctor asks the brother to leave the room in order that she undertake the examination. Alone with the doctor, the young girl begs her to save her from this brother, who would kill her. The doctor decides that she cannot examine the patient without her permission. She tells the young woman that she will
inform her brother that this is outside her purview. The patient objects, insisting that her brother will simply take her to another doctor. She then asks the doctor to claim that she examined her and that she was ‘honourable'. Her brother, she adds, will kill her otherwise. She is in love with another man and will marry him in a month, swearing to the doctor that nothing dishonourable occurred between them.

Examining her conscience and her medical codes, the doctor in the story calls in the brother and declares to him that his sister is honourable. As she explains it later, she believes that the girl is indeed honourable. ‘Medicine can only distinguish between disease and non-disease. It cannot distinguish between honour and dishonour.' The brother is made to apologize to his sister for doubting her and the two leave. The doctor then writes her own oath: ‘I swear that my humanity and my conscience will be my rules in my work and my art', adding ‘I put down my pen and felt an ease I had not felt for a long time.'

The framing technique here is more an introductory preface to the doctor's written words. If it were absent, however, it would not alter the essential plot of the story. Hence, its presence is quite eloquent. This doctor needs a third-person narrator as an intermediary who introduces the actual writing process itself. The recording of the story in writing differs from oral and epistolary framings, although like them it requires mediation. Like the other protagonists
whose sagas needed to be narrated by the doctor, Hamida and Hamido, from the countryside, are individuals who would not have access to the written word. The woman doctor is once more the means through which silent voices can tell their stories.

With the brother–sister combo, El Saadawi has put her medical finger on a deep societal problem. Brother–sister jealousy is pervasive in Arabo-Islamic culture. So pervasive, in fact, that the noted Arab folklorist Hasan El-Shamy has boldly argued that brother–sister sexual attraction and subsequent jealousy are so powerful in Arab culture that they replace in its psychological centrality the Oedipus conflict in Western society. This brother– sister relationship appears in texts ranging from the medieval to the modern, from the literary to the philosophical.

The sister in this Saadawian short story is frightened by her brother. Twice she repeats to the doctor that her brother will kill her. This is not an unrealistic expectation on the part of the young girl, as her Saadawian literary cousin, Hamida, demonstrates. The girl's honour is the motivating force behind the visit to the doctor. The female body must be certified as honourable before it can be handed on to the would-be husband. But this male knows little about women's solidarity. He is attempting to control a woman's body, which becomes a pawn in intricate social gender games. The doctor, however, is able to defeat this man's desire and give the young woman
back her body. Medicine as social power for the female comes to the rescue.

In the Saadawian short story, the brother's concern for his sister's virginity is pre-eminent. Her body is a commodity whose honour, if absent, will surely lead to her death. The Syrian male writer Zakariyya Tamir savagely attacks the marital customs that turn the female into a commodity in his short story ‘The Eastern Wedding'. There, the price of the young girl is agreed on, so much per kilo, and she is taken to the marketplace and weighed in. Tamir comes close to Saadawi, who even in
Memoirs of a Woman Doctor
likened the vocabulary used in the marriage ceremony to that used in the rental of an apartment, store, or other property. The marriage-as-commerce metaphor is repeated when the narrator of
Memoirs
wonders if people expect her to sit and wait while some man decides to come and buy her as one buys a cow. Woman's body is a commercial object whose value is linked to its ‘honour'.

Dr S's new oath with which she closes her case history calls for humanity and conscience not only in her work but in her art as well. Medicine and art are once again brought together in an eloquent proclamation. But it is through medicine that she has saved a sister from the death threats of her brother. Social justice becomes fused with the physician's art, understood in the broadest sense.

The story of Dr S., like
Memoirs of a Woman Doctor
, shows us the potential power of an upper-class woman in
Egyptian society. She may be able to save herself. She may sometimes be able to save others. But what we glimpse in these medical narratives, and what is more clearly revealed in other Saadawian narratives, is another female type: the lower-class woman who loses control over her body and who, if she attempts to regain it, will meet with physical destruction. This is certainly the case for Hamida in
The Circling Song
.

The simple phrase ‘only blood can wipe out shame', which links a corporal element, blood, to a social element, shame, is one so embedded in Arabo–Islamic culture that it takes on an enormous importance, as it is transformed and shortened to ‘honour killing'.

Fedwa Malti-Douglas

Martha C. Kraft Professor, Indiana University

AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION

Among the novels I have written,
The Circling Song
is one of the closest to my heart. I wrote it at the end of 1973 – in November, I'm quite sure – when I was going through a period marked by an enigmatic, internal sadness. Egypt's ruler at that time was extremely pleased with, and proud of, his victories; he was surrounded by a large entourage of men, and some women, all of whom applauded him for whatever reason, and perhaps without any reason.

It was not clear to me what the principal source of my melancholy was, but there certainly were some external reasons that contributed: being deprived of my position and summarily dismissed from my job the year before (in August 1972) because of some of my published writings; the confiscation of my books and articles; and the inclusion of my name on the government's blacklist. Meanwhile, every morning I saw the face of Egypt's ruler printed on newspaper and magazine pages, and I could hear his voice reverberating from various loudspeakers.

No affiliation or contact linked me with politics or the ruling establishment, or with the ruler. I was writing all the
time, and carrying on my medical practice on a part-time basis. But a relationship of sorts developed between the ruler and me (from one side, of course); it was an association based on hatred. I had not experienced hatred before in that way: at the time, most of my relationships were ones built on affection.

From time to time, I visited my village, Kafr Tahla. There I would feel a sense of relief and relaxation as I sat in my father's very modest old house, which was almost bare of furnishings. I would smell the fragrance of its dirt floor, newly sprinkled by my cousin Zaynab to keep the dust down. I would see the faces of the children, both girls and boys, looking like flowers just as they open, covered with flies as bees cover a blossom. I would hear them singing as they played atop the dung heaps.

One of their songs was ‘Hamida had a baby…' I used to hear them frequently as they sang it, and I had heard it many times before as a child, as one of them. I don't know why, when I heard them singing it this particular time, the song inspired me with the idea behind this novel.

The idea was vague and cryptic, and profound; it kept me from sleeping for several days, or perhaps weeks. Then I began to write. Carrying my papers inside a cloth tote bag and wearing my leather sandals – since they had flexible, rubber-like soles – I would leave my house on Murad Street in Giza, just across the river from Cairo. It would take me about half an hour to traverse Nile Street, cross the Cairo University Bridge, and reach my destination: a small, outdoor garden
café by the Nile, since demolished to make way for the Fire Department. Seated on a bamboo chair, a little bamboo table before me, I would gaze at the waters of the Nile and write.

I wrote the first draft of the novel in a few weeks, and rewrote it in a few days. As I wrote certain sections, I could feel the tears on my face. When Hamida (or Hamido) felt tears, I felt my own. I was sure that my novel would amount to something, for as long as I was crying real tears along with the characters of the novel, then surely this work was artistically alive, and would have a similar effect on those who read it.

Whenever I heard the microphones and broadcasts bellowing out their joyous songs, my sadness would grow. I didn't know which of the two emotions held more reality: the joy of the world around me, or the sadness inside. I felt that this world and I were utterly incompatible, and the novel was simply an attempt to give that incompatibility concrete form.

I couldn't publish this novel in Egypt, of course, since I was on the government's blacklist. So I tried to publish it in Beirut. At that time, Beirut was like a lung which gave many writers – men and women prohibited from publishing – the ability to breathe.

Dar al-Adab published the novel in Beirut two or three years – I don't remember exactly – after I had written it. In Egypt, naturally, the critics ignored it. Perhaps they even avoided reading it, for this was the treatment they had consistently given my other books. Thus, the novel came out
in an atmosphere of silence, and it has lived in the same silence to the present. But people did read it, because the publisher in Beirut reprinted it more than once, and because one of the publishers in Egypt also has published it several times (since 1982). But the critics in Egypt maintained their silence, while the novel continued to be published and read in Egypt as well as in other Arab countries.

Meanwhile, I had forgotten this novel completely and had written other novels in a very different style. Yet the characteristics and structure of this particular novel lived on in my imagination, like a dream that one has once had. I wanted to write another, perhaps a more ambitious novel that would draw upon the same way of writing. And from time to time I would meet a woman or man who had read it, or receive a letter from a reader – sometimes a woman, sometimes a man – making a comment about this novel along the lines of ‘This little book has released so many of my innermost feelings! Why don't you always write in this style?'

But every idea has its own particular mode of expression, and I made no attempt to impose this style on different thoughts or ideas.

One day when I was in London, the publisher of this novel asked me if I had a new novel which could be translated and published. I don't know why this particular work came to mind immediately – this novel which had been published in Arabic for the first time more than a decade before in Beirut.
I realized that I was very fond of
The Circling Song
, and that it was like the sort of close relationship which one does not forget no matter how many years pass. I hadn't read the novel for ten years, as I don't like to read my books after they are published, but the translator of this novel gave me a copy of the translation for me to review. The strangest thing happened: it seemed as if I were reading it for the first time. I would stop at certain sections, surprised, as if the writer were another woman, someone other than me. Indeed – and how peculiar this seemed – I felt actual tears coming whenever Hamida (or Hamido) cried. And this is how I knew that the translation was as I wished it to be.