Walking Through Fire : A Life of Nawal el Saadawi

by Nawal El Saadawi; Translated with an Introduction by Sherif Hetata

• ISBN13: 9781842770764
• ISBN10: 1842770764
• Format: Trade Book
• Copyright: 2002-07-05
• Publisher: Zed Books

Summary

Walking Through Fireis the story of Nawal El Saadawi, the first Arab woman to write about sex and its relation to economics and politics. It explores her extraordinary life spent in resistance, and shows the passion for justice that has shaped her life and writings. A sequel to her first autobiography, A Daughter of Isis, this book chronicles her time spent as a rural doctor, her attempts to set up women's organizations and publish magazines later banned by authorities or endangered by fundamentalist threats, her time in exile after her name was published on a death list, and her marriages and ensuing struggles against her "false self".

Author Biography

Egyptian novelist, doctor and militant writer on Arab women's problems and their struggle for liberation, Nawal el Saadawi was born in the village of Kafr Tahla. Refusing to accept the limitations imposed by both religious and colonial oppression on most women of rural origin, she qualified as a doctor in 1955 and rose to become Egypt's Director of Public Health. Since she began to write over 30 years ago, her books have concentrated on women. In 1972, her first work of non fiction, Women and Sex, evoked the antagonism of highly placed political and theological authorities, and the Ministry of Health was pressurised into dismissing her. Under similar pressures she lost her post as Chief Editor of a health journal and as Assistant General Secretary in the Medical Association in Egypt. From 1973 to 1976 she worked on researching women and neurosis in the Ain Shams University's Faculty of Medicine; and from 1979 to 1980 she was the United Nations Advisor for the Women's Programme in Africa (ECA) and Middle East (ECWA). Later in 1980, as a culmination of the long war she had fought for Egyptian women's social and intellectual freedom, an activity that had closed all avenues of official jobs to her, she was imprisoned under the Sadat regime. She has since founded the Arab Women's Solidarity Association and devoted her time to being a writer, journalist and worldwide speaker on women's issues. With the publication by Zed Books in 1980 of The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World, English language readers were first introduced to the work of this major writer. Zed Books has also published four of her previous novels, Woman at Point Zero (1983), God Dies by the Nile (1985), The Circling Song (1989) and Searching (1991) as well as a collection of her non-fiction writings The Nawal El Saadawi Reader (1997). She has received three literary awards.

Sherif Hetata is a writer and medical doctor who endured imprisonment and excile.

Table of Contents

The Threat	1	(22)
Spreading My Wings	23	(47)
The Village Doctor	70	(19)
The Tripartite Invasion	89	(13)
What is Suppressed Always Comes Back	102	(15)
Love and Despair	117	(8)
My Mother has no Place in Paradise	125	(20)
Moments that Belong Nowhere	145	(13)
The Death Threat	158	(3)
Beyond Consiciousness	161	(11)
The Photograph	172	(12)
The Scalpel and the Law	184	(10)
The Defeat	194	(13)
Searching for Love	207	(12)
An Aborted Revolution	219	(13)
The Dream of Flying	232	(15)
Index	247