4. Boy-Girl, Brother-Sister

Firdaws’s narrative, enframed by that of the psychiatrist in Woman at Point Zero, seemed to emanate from the world of dreams. Yet the story that Firdaws tells is not very dreamlike. Her saga, like that of her literary cousin in Memoirs of a Woman Doctor, has an inherent diachrony. We see her as a young woman soon to undergo excision. We follow her as she becomes first a student, then a wife, then a prostitute. We leave her as she is taken to her death by the police. At the same time, Woman at Point Zero, helped by the psychiatrist’s prologue and epilogue, displays a circularity approaching that of another Saadawian novel, The Circling Song (Ughniyyat al-Atfâl al-Dâ’iriyya).^[1]

The Circling Song is one of Dr. El Saadawi’s more elusive novels. A work with a fragmented plot, The Circling Song boasts a first-person narrator who enframes a haunting narrative within a children’s song. Life in The Circling Song merges with death, and past with present. Characters die but come alive again. Time is not stable. The closing of the narrative reflects its opening.

Even so, certain overarching categories govern the text, specifically, gender and the body. The literary universe of this Saadawian novel revolves around Hamîdû and Hamîda, a male-female pair that calls into question sexual boundaries. What is the male body? What is the female body? In the parallel trajectories of the sibling heroes, gender combines with class issues and social concerns to create an explosive literary mixture. Rather than stabilizing the differences between the two genders, The Circling Song actively subverts the gendering of the human body.

But as with so many of El Saadawi’s texts, The Circling Song subverts not only cultural constructs but also the cultural artifacts that carry them. This powerful novel effectively rewrites and reinterprets one of the key gender-defining cultural “texts” of modern Egyptian society, the popular ballad of “Shafîqa wa-Mitwallî.” In that narrative, a brother murders his sister after her sexual improprieties have dishonored the family and wins social approval for his act.

Unlike many other Saadawian first-person narrators who tell the stories of others, the first-person narrator in The Circling Song is not a physician, nor is the gender of this narrator divulged immediately. At the start of the novel, this narrator watches as a circle of children’s bodies goes round and round, singing a refrain about Hamîda: Hamîda gave birth to a baby boy, whom she called ‘Abd al-Samad. She left him on the side of the canal, and a kite snatched his head.

A child pulls away from this circle—a girl, we learn. The narrator asks her her name: it is Hamîda. Hamîda does not answer when the narrator asks, “Are they singing to you?” but instead disappears through a wooden door. The narrator follows her and describes a sleeping Hamîda. The girl is then raped. The mother, upon discovering her pregnancy, sends her from the village on a train. The father then dispatches Hamîdû, the girl’s twin brother, to kill her and, hence, to wash out the shame. In the city (which we discover to be Cairo), the hungry Hamîda is raped by a policeman, who catches her trying to steal bread. Eventually she becomes a household servant and is raped again. Her brother, Hamîdû, arrives in the city and is taken into military service. Although he dies, as does Hamîda, both reappear in the novel. Hamîdû’s path merges with hers when she finds herself in his arms. Hamîda becomes a woman of the night and Hamîdû kills his father. But then he awakens as from a dream and joins the other children in the circle, while they are singing the refrain about Hamîda and her baby, ‘Abd al-Samad. The narrator is there as well, to watch a girl come out of the circle and to close the narrative.

Hamîda’s song sets the entire story in motion. It heralds the narrator’s entrance into, and exit from, the narrative. Indeed, Nawal El Saadawi, both as an adult and as a child, actually heard children singing this tune in her native village of Kafr Tahla in the Egyptian delta.^[2] But the distance from this refrain to the powerful text of The Circling Song is more than mere intertextuality. The song the children sing in El Saadawi’s novel is in Egyptian dialect, and thus is set off from the literary Arabic that dominates the bulk of the narrative. The dialect vouches for the popular, local Egyptian nature of the song. Yet on another level, it also speaks to the innocence of the children, for whom the language of the song is the language they speak. This use of dialect is not accidental. When Hamîda is about to get raped by the policeman in Cairo, she asks him who he is and begs him to let her go: all in dialect.^[3] Her entreaties are, of course, to no avail: she becomes the innocent victim of the official.

The song does much more than permit a linguistic game. It is the action of Hamîda emerging from the singing circle that will identify the gender of the narrator and effect an identity between the narrator and the little girl. In looking at the face of this child who has broken away from her cohort, the narrator realizes that it is not a boy. Up until that point, the narrator had spoken of this individual using the grammatically male gender. But “it was a female. I did not know for certain that it was a female. For the faces of children are like the faces of old people: they have no gender.”^[4] (We shall return to this issue of gender.) This face is not strange to the narrator: the narrator recognizes her own face staring at her. Thus is the gender of the narrator established, along with her identity with the girl, Hamîda.

The song also foregrounds corporality in its opening line. Hamîda is introduced as someone who gives birth, and, in typically Middle Eastern fashion, the baby is a male. In fact, corporality is the first element that the reader encounters, with “a circle of small children’s bodies” opening the novel.

Hamîda is, hence, doubly defined as being of the body. And it is her female body that will subject her to multiple rapes. The first physical violation, that of the sleeping child, is perhaps the most important. Its social and corporal impact resounds throughout the narrative. The narrator, who has followed Hamîda as she disappears behind the wooden door, describes her sleeping body: she is sucking on a sweet hidden under her tongue. She is still asleep as rough fingers lift up the galabiyya from her white thighs. Then the dream changes:

The piece of sweets melted under her tongue. And the shopkeeper began to ask her for the piaster. She opened her hand but did not find the piaster. The boorish shopkeeper grabbed a stick and began to run after her.

The child runs away but suddenly feels, as one does in dreams, that her body has become heavy, as if it had turned to stone. The blows of the stick land between her open legs with a violence unknown to her. Hamîda screams, but no sound comes out of her mouth. A big broad hand blocks her mouth and nose, choking her. Now she becomes aware that she is not dreaming and that a large body smelling of tobacco is glued to hers.

Her eyes were closed, but she was able to see the features of the face. She perceived that they resembled the features of her father, or her brother, or her paternal uncle, or her maternal uncle, or her maternal cousin, or any other man.

When Hamîda awoke the next morning, the dream was not forgotten like previous dreams. The fingers had left red and blue traces on her arms and legs. “The blows of the stick still caused her pain between her thighs, and the smell of tobacco still stuck to her skin.”^[5]

Hamîda’s molestation is initially portrayed as a dream. The image of the candy melting in the young victim’s mouth renders the act that much more odious—though we shall see below that the candy has yet another function. The act of penetration is described as blows of a stick on the child’s thighs. Despite her closed eyes, Hamîda recognizes the perpetrator of the crime. The rapist, like his cousin in Firdaws’s narrative, is a generic male whose specific identity is irrelevant: he could be any male. What determines his role as rapist is precisely his gender.

But like Firdaws’s narrative, in which a dream state was concretized by a woman of flesh and blood, the dream for Hamîda turns out to be no dream. This fluidity between reality and unreality should not surprise us. After discovering the girl’s name, the narrator jokingly asks her if the group is singing to her. By this simple question, the narrator has created a deliberate confusion between a character in a song and a character whom the narrator meets. It is no wonder, then, that the rape turns out to be real. Its effects are corporal; the male’s aggression leaves physical traces. The tobacco functions in contrast to the piece of candy that Hamîda is enjoying, its smell representing man.

What about the first-person narrator? She enters the room directly after the young girl, completely familiar with the surroundings. She does not even knock first: “I did not touch the knocker, as is the custom of strangers when they knock on closed doors. I knew my way.” In fact, she trips on the way in, as she has “every time.”^[6] The narrator is clearly no stranger to Hamîda’s abode.

After entering, she declares: “I saw her asleep on the straw mat.” What does the presence of the narrator at this crucial moment mean? She stands by in the darkness, like a voyeur, observing the rape. She does not stop it but seems content simply to relate it. Only after the rape and after Hamîda’s mother has made the girl rest for a day, thinking she might be ill, does the narrator reenter the narrative.

There is, of course, more to this narration, which at first glance seems routine and even-handed, than meets the eye. Hamîda, despite her closed eyes, is able to recognize the perpetrator of the molestation. It is Man (with a capital M). Hamîda, the victim, has a face resembling that of the narrator. Her identity is, therefore, not so singularized as it is generalized. Might she not represent every woman, as the rapist represents every man? If so, then her physical violation would be the violation of the generic category of woman. This congruence facilitates the presence of the female narrator during the rape, for on a certain level she, too, is a victim of the unwanted sexual act, along with Hamîda.

The assault leads to Hamîda’s pregnancy, which inevitably is discovered. The progress of the young girl’s physical changes is indicated by means of her outer clothing. Just as the narrator was present for the rape, so is she the first person to have an inkling about the changes in Hamîda’s body. She can distinguish Hamîda from the other children by the blood spot on the back of her garment. Hamîda washes this garment and, while it is drying, dons another galabiyya. This garment eventually becomes too tight; when Hamîda has trouble squeezing her stomach into it, her mother realizes what is going on. The clothing seems to define the young girl. Hence, also, when the mother sends Hamîda away on the train she gives her a black headcloth, a piece of clothing that becomes synonymous with the older woman.

For Hamîda, as it was for her literary cousin, Firdaws, this childhood violation is but the first in a set of male aggressions. And just as Firdaws was raped by a corrupt policeman, so is Hamîda. In Cairo, the hungry young girl grabs some bread and is about to eat it. But “a large hand with long fingers wrapped itself around her arm.” The male figure of authority leads her away—to the police station, we are initially led to believe. As the pair enters a narrow street, however, the violation begins:

The long fingers were still wrapped around her arm. But they were not five fingers as they had been. They became four fingers. As for the fifth finger, it had separated itself from the rest of the fingers and climbed all alone higher up, over the soft arm, cautiously, like a thief, then it buried its rough black tip under the soft, childlike armpit in which no hair had yet grown.

Hamîda tries to pull her arm away. But the finger is insistent, progressing from the armpit to her breast.^[7]

This event is but a prelude to the rape that will follow. What a prelude, though! This corporal aggression parallels the male invasion of the female. The lone finger seems to have a life of its own as it proceeds to defile the young girl’s body, in nothing short of an act of penetration. This finger with its rough tip is like the male organ, and the victim’s soft and as yet hairless armpit, like a child’s vagina—the absence of hair only making the act that much more odious. The finger as unwanted male sexual organ is not alien in El Saadawi’s fiction; it was, as we have seen, a recurrent image in Firdaws’s world.

Unlike the first rape, in which Hamîda was asleep, here she is quite awake. No dream ameliorates the harsh reality in this instance. The physical surroundings in which this second violation occurs are quite unsavory, and the man’s clothing, like his independent finger, seems to come alive. Hamîda looks at the suit hanging on a nail in the room:

[The] yellow brass buttons shone in the darkness like open eyes afflicted with a viral liver infection. On the ground the heavy boot settled with its long neck, like an animal without a head. Next to it was a white pair of pants whose back had yellowed and whose belly had blackened, and from them emanated a smell of old urine.^[8]

The clothing is turned from inanimate object to live body. But this is not just any body: it is a body dissected by a physician’s pen, creating at once revulsion and threat. The buttons that are like diseased eyes “afflicted with a viral liver infection” function because of the power of the medical image. The long boot is endowed with a neck. And the pants become synonymous with the bottom half of a male torso: they have a back and a belly, like the human body, and their odor is that of a bodily excretion.

The actual naked male body appears before Hamîda. This time she spots “the sharp hard instrument that had been hiding in his pocket.”^[9] No doubt lingers in Hamîda’s mind now: “There was no shopkeeper beating with a stick.” Instead, the stick has given way to the “instrument.” The two violations are distinct; yet they are united by another common element: the second male body also reeks of tobacco.^[10]

Yet, there are differences between the two rapes. In the first, the generic male aggressor had choked off Hamîda’s scream with a big hand placed over her mouth and nose. In the second, the victim is not silent:

She said in a weak cracked voice:

—Who are you?

He replied in a commanding harsh voice:

—I am the government.^[11]

The identity of the aggressor is extracted from him by his female prey. The contrast between her voice and his—weak and cracked versus commanding and harsh—is eloquent.^[12]

As Susan Brownmiller demonstrates in Against Our Will, sexual violation of the female body by officers of the law is not unusual.^[13] In identifying himself as “the government,” however, this Saadawian male has expanded the boundaries of his transgression. From an act committed by a single individual, rape is turned into a global violation, one encompassing the entirety of the patriarchal political structure. When this “government” victimizes the child Hamîda because of her attempt to satisfy her physical hunger, that victimization takes on much larger proportions. To the gender dimension of rape are added class and political ones.

The class dimension of female corporal violation is amplified in the case of Hamîda’s rape by her master. Someone seeing Hamîda walk with an uneven gait while carrying a heavy basket might think she was lame. But no, the narrator assures the reader; Hamîda was not lame, she was simply hungry. She stretched her hand into the basket and moved her fingers under the vegetables until she could feel the fresh meat. “She tore off a piece and shoved it between her teeth before anyone could see her.” Her mistress, however, smelled the crushed meat. Hamîda denied what she had done, but a small piece of meat had lodged between her teeth, giving her mistress solid proof.

The task of beating the servant fell this time to the master. Hamîda sat in the kitchen awaiting her punishment. The master’s fingers started by lifting her galabiyya above her waist. The young girl resisted, kicking with her feet. Her master grabbed a foot.

He perceived for the first time the form of a woman’s foot. For the foot had five toes, each one separated from the other. Her mistress’s foot did not have toes, since her toes were stuck one to the other in a soft fleshy mass, like a camel’s hoof.

The male also discovers that the young woman’s muscles move, unlike those of her mistress, “in which his fingers sank without resistance, as they would sink into a bag of cotton.” (The narrator is quick to add here that this was natural given the fact that the mistress had already died in the bedroom.) Hamîda’s live flesh turns her master into “a pig who suddenly gets out of a ruined environment in which he has been living for years on cadavers and remnants of corpses.” He then proceeds to rape her.^[14]

The repeated experiences of molestation begin to echo one another. Once again, Hamîda’s body is the target of an unscrupulous male. The master even resembles the previous violator. His eyes are initially described as yellow, shining with a brassy light—the mirror image of the policeman’s brassy buttons that were like diseased eyes. During this rape, Hamîda recalls “a first beating.” Her eyes fix on a stick, hiding under his clothing or behind his back. The stick, of course, echoes the initial molestation in the village, an event that changed Hamîda’s life permanently.

Another element links the last two violations: death. After the government official has performed his vile act, there is “a moment of silence resembling death.”^[15] And death lurks in the background as the master defiles the young female servant, with the mistress’s corpse lying close by. The nexus of death and sexuality is not foreign in modern Arabic literature. Yûsuf Idrîs, for example, exploited it in a short story, “The Greatest Operation” (al-‘Amaliyya al-Kubrâ), where, although the sexual act is not a rape, copulation takes place in the presence of a dying patient.^[16]

The male culprits in The Circling Song share something else besides: as the rapes proceed, they are relegated, by means of a powerful imagery that ever ascends in complexity, to the realm of animals. In the village, the rapist enters the room like a “panther.”^[17] After the sexual act, the “government” lapses into snoring, which, increasing in intensity, “becomes like the gurgling of an old waterwheel pulled by an exhausted sick bull.”^[18] We have already seen that the master is transformed, at the sight of Hamîda’s flesh, into a pig who has only fed on dead bodies. Thus the animal imagery proceeds from panther to bull to pig. The panther is in itself not a negative image: quite the contrary, in fact. The image bespeaks courage in the male and can serve as an ideal to which young boys should aspire.^[19] The bull might function similarly, though here the text subverts the image by calling the animal sick and exhausted. The pig is the most fascinating symbol of the three. In Muslim societies, the pig is a filthy animal that combines religious prohibition with popular disgust. To liken Hamîda’s master to a pig is to relegate him to the lowest possible rank, even among animals.

The three rapes, despite their similarities, in fact represent different forms of violation. The first rape, with its generic male culprit, calls attention to the gendered nature of the act. The second rape, with the “government” as culprit, underscores the patriarchal and political nature of male aggression against the female. To the question of gender has been added that of patriarchy and politics. With the third violation, perpetrated by an upper-class “master” on a poor woman, the circle is complete. Class is now attached to gender and politics to unite the three dimensions of male violation of the female body.

Hamîda’s body serves other, equally important functions, however. In the last incident, her live (read: young) body is contrasted with that of her dead mistress. But corporality does more than separate youth from old age, life from death. As the master examines Hamîda’s body parts, he realizes that they are different in essence from those of his wife. The mistress’s foot, for instance, is one mass of flesh, closer to a camel’s hoof than to a human foot. Hamîda’s foot, on the other hand, possesses five toes that are distinct one from the other, as they should be. Hamîda’s body testifies to her humanity, whereas that of her mistress testifies to the older woman’s animality.

Hamîda’s humanness is not what instigates the rapes, however. Another form of corporality does that, another bodily function that is intimately tied to the violation of the female: eating. In the first rape, Hamîda, the innocent child, is sucking on a sweet, for which she has not paid. In the second, Hamîda, the hungry girl in the alien city, is about to bite into a piece of stolen bread. In the third, Hamîda, the household servant, has chewed on a forbidden piece of meat. The oral act of eating on the part of the female engenders sexual aggression on the part of the male. It is as though woman is not meant to indulge in the corporal activity of eating. In a sense, however, this is not just any kind of food consumption. In all three cases, Hamîda acquired the food by dishonest means.

Does that mean that a system of justice is at work here? And that Hamîda could participate in the activity of eating were she to acquire her food in an honest way? We have already seen the problematic of eating and the female operating in Memoirs of a Woman Doctor, where the narrator had to complete her medical studies and then escape to the countryside before she could indulge freely in the activity of eating. The situation was not dissimilar for Firdaws in Woman at Point Zero, for whom financial liberation meant liberation in the area of eating as well.

For Hamîda, as for her literary cousins, eating is a forbidden domain. Unlike the physician narrator and the prostitute hero, however, Hamîda’s orality defines her social class. She is not like the upper-class woman doctor, who is able to consume food freely, nor has she descended to the level of Firdaws the prostitute, who can eat freely if she sells her body. Hamîda is locked into a class situation that does not permit her the luxury of partaking of food without enduring a parallel physical molestation. She does not sell her body to acquire the privilege of eating. Although the relation of body orifice (mouth) to body orifice (vagina) is present as it was for Firdaws, the dynamics have changed.

Gender and class come together in Hamîda’s trajectory of physical violation. But to accentuate this relationship, especially as it intersects with food, the Saadawian narrator in The Circling Song creates images and bisociations that place her saga within a larger Egyptian cultural domain.

As Hamîda chews on the stolen piece of meat, the narrator explains that her teeth are small and white, but sharp. Able to tear raw meat and grind bones, they are

primitive teeth that sprouted on top of her jaws centuries ago, before forks, knives, and other modern implements had been invented (it is because of these implements that her master’s teeth lost their strength and his gums were afflicted with pyorrhea).^[20]

Thus Hamîda’s manner of eating is contrasted with that of her master. The disease that afflicts his mouth is interpreted as the result of modern technological advances. (The narrator draws a similar analogy focused on hearing and its loss.)^[21]

Hamîda’s attempt to consume meat and her subsequent punishment for this act is symbolic of much more. Meat eating and overeating are not just gender-related; they are also class-related. The narrator, in speaking about garbage that is the property of “meat eaters,” says that people’s rubbish increases as their rank in society goes up. The more one orifice takes in, the more another orifice lets out. Hamîda’s master, we learn, is endowed with a huge stomach, hence he creates a great quantity of refuse. This material, the narrator tells us, is carted and “gathered in the shape of a high pyramid in a distant place in the desert,” to be admired by tourists.^[22]

In one stroke, the narrator of The Circling Song has savagely linked the eating habits of the wealthy with Egyptian civilization, turning Egypt’s greatest tourist attraction into a refuse heap created by the bodily excrement of the upper classes. The tourists are not let off the hook, either: rather than appreciating an internationally acclaimed artistic monument, they unknowingly admire a pile of trash. And another linkage—the social process of garbage creation is fused with the biological one of human waste production, truly a body social.

The implications of these attacks on dining customs are not lost on the socially conscious Arabic reader of The Circling Song. The connection between meat eating and the upper classes is a topos in contemporary Egyptian culture, both literary and popular. One has but to listen to the songs of the leftist singer al-Shaykh Imâm, many of whose ballads are written by the popular dialect poet, Ahmad Fu’âd Najm.^[23] In “On the Subject of Beans and Meat” (‘An Mawdû‘ al-Fûl wal-Lahma), for instance, al-Shaykh Imâm reminds poor Egyptians that “those who eat meat will surely go to hell”—an effort to keep them from coveting and consuming this expensive product. Then there are the comic-strip heroes, the tubby Tanâbila, created and drawn by the prize-winning Egyptian cartoonist Ahmad Hijâzî. The adventures of the Tanâbila, whose universe in fact revolves around eating, are a searing commentary on politics and society in the Middle East. At one point, they are tricked out of hiding by an ostentatious display of Middle Eastern delicacies, including fancy meat dishes, all carried by figures in tattered clothing.^[24]

But Nawal El Saadawi’s closest literary neighbor here is perhaps the fellow Egyptian novelist, essayist, and short story writer Yûsuf al-Qa‘îd (b. 1944). Like El Saadawi, al-Qa‘îd hails from a small village, this one in the coastal district of al-Buhayra. And like his comrades on the Egyptian left, al-Qa‘îd, an avowed Marxist and Communist, does not shy away from issues of social injustice in his fiction. Interestingly, some of his most powerful imagery revolves around eating and meat. When the night watchman in War in the Land of Egypt (al-Harb fî Barr Misr) greets the ‘umda (village chief), he focuses on the village chief’s hand.

As for the ‘umda’s hand, it was heavy, fat, warm, and full of flesh. I came close to the back of his hand to kiss it. My lips sank into the folds of flesh. I remembered that I had not eaten meat since the last feast. I got lost while I was trying to count how many months had passed since the last feast. My tired brain could not do the complicated accounting of the days and months. The ‘umda left his hand so that I could kiss it. He imagines that that will make us happy, and for this reason he leaves it until we become satiated from the kissing.^[25]

The night watchman makes all the necessary links between the village chief’s fat, fleshy hand and the eating of meat. In fact, he moves directly from the hand to the meat, the act of kissing being the intermediary. Thus the mouth, used both for kissing and for eating, becomes the body part uniting the two worlds. Orality has once again surfaced, this time to focus attention on class injustice. The poor are to become satiated from kissing the fleshy hand, an act that substitutes the orality of the kiss for that of eating and the fleshiness of the ‘umda’s hand for that of real meat.

Later, when the same watchman is served an elaborate feast by the village chief, the poor man sees the various dishes that include meat and realizes that he has not eaten “for thousands of years.” He is awed by the eating utensils and, for fear of misusing them, restricts himself to foods that can be consumed with a spoon: soup, rice, vegetables, salad. In an ironic twist, therefore, his fear leads him to the nonconsumption of the very food item he so desires: meat. As for the ‘umda, the watchman describes his relationship with these foods as an old one:

A friendship thousands of years old. A relationship of love I had lost. He approached the food. His facial characteristics appeared at ease while he stuffed his mouth with pieces of meat.^[26]

Al-Qa‘îd’s powerful class-centered food imagery in War in the Land of Egypt highlights some of El Saadawi’s gender-related food images in The Circling Song. Both Egyptian authors exploit the eating utensils, but they do so to different ends. The male writer centers on the discomfort of the watchman, ill at ease before these implements, a discomfort that subsequently prevents him from benefiting from the food presented to him. Al-Qa‘îd’s literary exploitation reminds one of that in Tâhâ Husayn’s classic autobiography, The Days (al-Ayyâm). Here, eating implements become, for the blind protagonist, a savage commentary on the situation of the visually handicapped in both East and West and their inability to partake of food in the same way that the sighted do.^[27] Civilizational issues merge with class ones because these implements, developed in the West, are less commonly used as one moves down the Egyptian social ladder.

The eating utensils function for al-Qa‘îd’s watchman as physical barriers erected to maintain the separation of social classes. Indeed, they symbolize the upper class. For Dr. El Saadawi, the situation is different. In The Circling Song, eating utensils are not a sign of the superiority of the wealthy over the poor; in fact, the opposite is true. The implements are responsible for the decay of the master’s gums, leading to pyorrhea. Hamîda’s teeth, by contrast, are praised. They have no intermediary between themselves and the food. After all, Hamîda rips up the raw meat with her fingers and places it directly in her mouth. Rather than signs of progress and of the success of the upper classes, the eating utensils are symbols of their decadence, leading to their corporal decay. In al-Qa‘îd’s work one senses a nostalgia, a yearning on the part of the male-created lower-class watchman for the inherent supremacy of the upper-class ‘umda. The narrator of the feminist novel, however, has no such nostalgia. She subverts the positive valuations of the utensils by calling attention to their destructive nature.

El Saadawi’s narrative also shares with that of al-Qa‘îd an awareness of the timeless nature of food-related activity. Again, however, the two writers’ agendas differ. In the case of the male leftist, the thousands of years are attached to both the watchman and the village chief. The thousands of years of absence of food from the life of the former is paralleled by the thousands of years of friendship with the various foods in the life of the latter. There would seem to be no exit from this culinary class antagonism.

Despite superficial similarities in the situation linking El Saadawi’s Hamîda and her master, this lower-class woman’s plight is quite distinct from that of the Qa‘îdian watchman. In The Circling Song, the young female servant embodies a corporal strength that is centuries old, her sharp, primitive teeth having sprouted on her jaws that long ago. Her eternal qualities are positive. By contrast, the master’s teeth have evolved, but for the worse. Thanks to technological advances, they have lost the sharpness that defines the female teeth and are accompanied by diseased gums. In the corporal class-based struggle, the female is superior. And, despite his avowed Marxism, al-Qa‘îd’s system is static, while that of his feminist compatriot is dynamic.

The pairing of the male and the female in this food-related game in The Circling Song is not a literary accident. Male and female are what make this textual world go round. This is not to say that class issues are not important; they are simply superseded by gender-related ones. Here again, Yûsuf al-Qa‘îd makes a good foil. His War in the Land of Egypt revolves, like El Saadawi’s Circling Song, around two characters. But whereas for the feminist, these two characters are male-female identical twins, for the male leftist, they are two males, who, though not quite identical twins, share enough characteristics to allow one to substitute for the other in the army. These young men are, respectively, the son of the powerful village chief and the son of the watchman—a juxtaposition between social classes that allows for a searing attack on the social and political system of Egypt.^[28]

The preeminence of gender means that the most powerful pair in The Circling Song is the brother-sister couple of Hamîda and Hamîdû. As brother and sister, they are of the same class. Hamîda is raped and becomes pregnant. Her mother banishes her by sending her on the train that will carry her to the city and to more exploitation. When Hamîdû becomes aware of her absence, he realizes that

he does not know how he will live without Hamîda. For she is not a normal sister, but his twin. And twins are of two types. A type that grows from two embryos living in one womb, and another that grows from a male and a female inside one embryo.

Hamîdû and Hamîda were one embryo growing inside one womb. From the beginning, they had been one thing, or one cell. Then everything split into two. The features split into two, even the small muscle under each eye split into two. And it was no longer possible for anyone to know Hamîdû from Hamîda. Even their mother used to mix them up.^[29]

Hamîdû is not given the opportunity to muse about this problem. He is sent after Hamîda, also on a train, but this time by the father. The paternal figure, giving Hamîdû something “long, hard, and sharp that shone in the darkness like a knife,” admonishes him harshly: “Shame is only washed out by blood.”^[30] His orders are clear: Hamîdû is to avenge the dishonor that has befallen the family from Hamîda’s act, and this through the shedding of her blood in murder.

This responsibility, falling as it does on the shoulders of the brother, makes of Hamîdû a normal phenomenon in the Arabo-Islamic cultural and literary sphere: a brother accountable for maintaining his sister’s, and hence the family’s, honor. But the plot of The Circling Song could not be more Egyptian. The story of the murderous brother is told in such popular ballads as “Shafîqa and Mitwallî” and its variant, “The Girgâwî Affair.”^[31] Indeed, the ballad of Shafîqa and Mitwallî has enjoyed such status as a model of appropriate behavior (on the part of the brother, that is) that another Egyptian feminist, Laylâ Abû Sayf, felt the need to compose an alternate ballad in which the brother does not kill his sister.^[32] Nawal El Saadawi’s own rewriting of this narrative is even more daring than that of her compatriot.

This narrative topos of sinful sister and avenging brother goes beyond the popular ballad, however, to more elite literary forms. It occurs, for example, in the famous novel Bidâya wa-Nihâya by the Egyptian Nobel Laureate Najîb Mahfûz. There, the brother drives his prostitute sister to suicide, then follows his own parallel suicide.^[33] Mahfûz’s Trilogy exploits similar themes as well.^[34] Hamîdû in The Circling Song is launched into the role that the brother took upon himself in El Saadawi’s “A Story from a Female Physician’s Life,” where, as we saw, the brother was apparently prepared to murder his sister if the doctor found that she had besmirched the family honor.

The forces pushing Hamîdû are really beyond him. When his father utters the phrase “Shame is only washed out by blood,” he unwittingly fuses social and corporal concerns. The social notion of shame becomes tied to a bodily fluid like blood through sets of civilizational and cultural mental structures whose common denominator is woman’s body. Hamîda’s forcibly impregnated body becomes the locus of the family shame. The spilling of her blood will rectify this gap in the collective honor.

The command from father to son to wash away the shame is heard more than once in the novel. Its most eloquent manifestation, however, occurs when brother and sister are united in an incestuous embrace. Hamîda is lying in someone’s arms. She asks him who he is, and he replies, “Hamîdû.” Closing her eyes so that “he does not recognize them,” she leaves his arms around her and his breath warming her. When he asks her who she is, she does not reply. Instead she makes believe that she is asleep and hides her head in his abundant chest hair. “And when she felt the big fingers lifting the dress from her, she held her breath. Her chest stopped rising and falling. She became dead.” When the warm sun falls on her eyes in the morning, she sees the long body next to hers:

His shoulders are uneven, resembling her shoulders. His fingers are swollen, ulcerated from the wash water like her fingers. His nails are black like her nails. She knew immediately that he/it was her body, so she hugged him with all her strength.

She then feels his leather wallet and discovers in it a picture of herself wearing the black headcloth and looking like her mother on her wedding night, as well as a command in her father’s handwriting reminding Hamîdû of the “washing out of the shame.”^[35]

Brother and sister have enacted a scenario declared taboo by social and cultural norms: they are in each other’s arms.^[36] The fear associated with this act is an ironic commentary on the importance of the brother-sister bond in Arab culture.^[37] But El Saadawi has effected a stunning reversal of this centuries-old cultural obsession. Hamîdû is as much a victim of the consequences of Hamîda’s initial rape as is she. He is also a passive party to the brother-sister incest. After all, Hamîda is cognizant of his identity, but he is not of hers. She allows the situation to proceed. At the same time, however, as the male is uncovering her body, she dies, rendering her unconscious to whatever acts are to follow.

On awakening, she discovers Hamîdû’s wallet, with its written order from the father to Hamîdû to wash out the shame. Hamîda does not flinch when she reads this order. She simply pilfers the money from Hamîdû’s wallet in order to buy food and outfit herself with some fashionable clothing.

Nevertheless, this injunction, now in written form, turns the incestuous episode between brother and sister on its head. After all, Hamîdû is ordered to kill his sister, not seduce her. Is this so inexplicable, however? Does it not link male jealousy with male desire? The father hands the young boy the instrument with which he is to avenge the family honor. This instrument is described as “something long, hard, and sharp,” which shines in the dark like a knife. Hamîdû places this instrument in his pocket, where it falls to the bottom and “hung alongside his thighs.”^[38]

The killing tool, handed down from father to son, is intriguing, indeed. It represents nothing less than the male sexual organ. But this identity becomes manifest only in the context of Hamîda’s (and Hamîdû’s) larger trajectory outside the village. When prior to her rape Hamîda lifts her eyes and sees the government official standing naked before her, “the sharp, hard instrument that was hiding in his pocket became apparent.”^[39] And, of course, this instrument is the male organ. Or, when Hamîdû recognizes that certain individuals are male, it is because he is tipped off by, among other things, “the hard killing instruments hanging alongside their thighs.”^[40]

This virtual identity between the instrument of murder and the corporal instrument of sexual exploitation then permits a further game of identity, this time between Hamîda’s rape and her virtual killing. As the incestuous situation progresses, Hamîda “became dead.” Hamîdû has, in a sense, fulfilled his father’s order to murder his sister: he has killed her. But the killing tool is not what it was at first glance. The penis, it seems, is as deadly as the knife. This murderous act on the part of the brother with its death imagery ties this sexual encounter to the other physical violations of the female, in which death, as we have seen, played such an important role.

More than the subversion of the patriarch’s order is at work here. The illicit brother-sister episode plays a part in the gender game of identity between Hamîda and Hamîdû, a game with which the narrator has been involved throughout the narrative. Hamîda recognizes the body lying next to hers as her own body: it has the same uneven shoulders, the same swollen and ulcerated fingers, and the same black fingernails. This should perhaps not come as too great a surprise. The narrator had already delineated the identical nature of the twins, one of each gender, emanating from the same embryo; their facial features were so alike that even their mother mixed them up.

The initial identity between Hamîdû and Hamîda leads to a parallel in some of the essential events in the narrative. The mother sends Hamîda out of the village; the father sends Hamîdû out of the village. The two exits stand side by side in the narrative as corresponding and repeated actions. Just as the mother places her hand on Hamîda’s mouth, so the father places his on Hamîdû’s mouth. The time of night is identical, as is the quiet of the village. The two naked, big feet of the parents move in the same way on the ground. A major difference surfaces when mother and father give each child, respectively, an object before sending them on their way. The mother hands Hamîda the black headcloth; the father hands Hamîdû the long, hard instrument. The incest scene highlights these objects and redefines them. When Hamîda discovers Hamîdû’s wallet, she sees a picture of herself wearing the black headcloth and looking like her mother on her wedding night. The headcloth that turns Hamîda into the image of her own mother and the knife that functions as a male sexual organ are signs of adulthood handed down by each parent: by the mother to the young girl and by the father to the young boy. Seen this way, the incest scene represents the coming of age of the two protagonists.

But what a coming of age! Is the narrator advocating an incestuous relationship so that male hero and female hero, brother and sister, can fulfill their narrative roles? Quite the opposite. This adult Hamîda-Hamîdû encounter in fact calls into question the entire notion of gender. The essential corporal identity between male and female heroes is posited. Hamîda’s discovery that Hamîdû’s body is like hers, indeed is hers, is only the culmination of a long debate in the narrative of The Circling Song over what constitutes the male and what constitutes the female body.

Male and female are not such obvious and clearly delineated categories, we learn from the astute narrator of this complex text. The narrator argues for the importance of precision in addressing even the most basic linguistic gender issues. A writer must be careful and not ignore a single dot. This is especially true in Arabic, where “male becomes female because of a dot or a slash.” Thus also does a husband (ba‘l) become a mule (baghl)—a move that echoes previous human-animal bisociations—or a promise a scoundrel, and so on.^[41]

It is when this grammatically correct linguistic discussion moves into other domains, like the corporal, social, and religious, that it becomes culturally more provocative. Is Hamîdû, as a male, a distinct bodily entity from Hamîda? What differentiates his male body from her female one? The young boy knew he was different from Hamîda and that, from birth, his body was separate from hers. But he would still become confused

and think he was Hamîda. So he would hide behind a wall and lift the galabiyya from his thighs and look behind them. And when his eyes fell on the thin, small slit, he would know he was Hamîda.^[42]

More than once, Hamîdû checks for the male organ.^[43] Hamîda indulges in the same activity: “She lifted her galabiyya from her legs and looked. The old familiar organ was not there. Rather, there was a small slit.”^[44]

Hamîdû is able to imitate Hamîda’s voice so well that she believes it to be her own voice.^[45] Hamîda, however, can actually turn into Hamîdû. When she went out to buy tobacco for any one of the men in her family, she would bring the tobacco close to her nose, which would make her cough. As she coughed, the corners of her mouth would swell like those of her father. She would then imitate his harsh voice and stand in the courtyard as he did. “Those who saw her at that moment used to think that she was Hamîdû. She herself used to think she was Hamîdû.”^[46] Hamîdû, likewise, loved to be a woman at times.^[47]

The male sexual organ, seemingly gender flexible, was, Hamîdû’s mother told him, a divine punishment placed on Adam because he had committed the greatest sin: “And all of a sudden there was an ugly organ growing between his thighs.”^[48] The narrator’s allusion to divine punishment links gender to religion. Hamîdû, at this point a dead body, has time to think about the logic of what his mother had instilled in him, namely: “How did Adam commit the sin before this organ was created for him?” This question is left unanswered. Once again, though, the Arabic language has a role to play. The narrator notes that as a dead Hamîdû looks between his thighs he does not spot the sexual organ, but finds in its stead “a small slit that resembles the slit he used to see in Hamîda’s body.” He thought there was some confusion and that in the final sorting they had given him a woman’s body. There are always mistakes in the final sorting, the narrator is quick to add, because the official in charge has weak vision. His duty is to move the names from the first sorting to the final one. Some names share letters, and female names often differ from male names by only one letter, the Arabic “tâ’ marbûta.” Thus it is that “Amîn becomes Amîna, and Zuhayr becomes Zuhayra, and Mufîd becomes Mufîda, and Hamîdû becomes Hamîda. In other words, it is only a stroke of a pen, and the man becomes a woman.”^[49]

Linguistic coupling of the male and female names is based on their virtual identity but for the feminine suffix. When the narrator places Hamîdû and Hamîda next to each other and alongside other male-female onomastically identical couples, she has inadvertently transformed them all into brother-sister couples. In fact, these onomastic couplings based on identical names for brothers and sisters involved in problematic relationships are part and parcel of Arab folklore.^[50]

Gender malleability (or could we call it “gender trouble,” to use Judith Butler’s phrase?)^[51] is central to The Circling Song. Whether one has a slit or a killing instrument determines a body’s allegiance to one gender or another. A mere linguistic categorization determines a host of cultural issues. The play between male and female, the corporal uncertainty of who is Hamîdû and who is Hamîda, is provocative. It is not a case of either of them being a hermaphrodite, of having both male and female sexual organs—a status not alien to Arabo-Islamic culture, in which their legal status was vigorously debated,^[52] and some historians even went so far as to record their births.^[53] No, Hamîda and Hamîdû are twins, one supposedly of each gender. It is simply that in their case gender is unstable, creating an androgynous situation. Yet this is not an androgyny like that of Ursula K. Le Guin’s futuristic world of Gethen, where no male-female distinction exists (to take a case in the Western cultural sphere),^[54] or even like that of Tahar Ben Jelloun’s fiction, where an infant of one gender is disguised as the other (to take a case from the North African cultural sphere).^[55] Hamîdû and Hamîda are distinct entities. Clothing only adds to the complexity in El Saadawi’s literary universe. In Egypt (and other parts of the Middle East), traditionally dressed males often wear a long, loose-flowing garment that reaches the ankles, called in Egypt a galabiyya (in Morocco, it is a jellaba). The same garment also serves as the clothing of the traditionally dressed female.

Sartorial similarity facilitates the narrator’s task in The Circling Song. At least as far as Hamîdû and Hamîda are concerned, the identity in clothing does not suggest cross-dressing. But gender games are larger than the brother-sister couple in this novel. In her new role as an independent woman, Hamîda is picked up by her master and taken to his secondary residence. After he undresses, he places one leg on the bed and the other on the floor. Hamîda happens to glance at him at that moment, and what does she see? Not the killing instrument but the “old blocked-up wound,” a familiar textual reference to the female genital area (and to clitoridectomy—but more on that in Chapter 7). Hamîda then turns her head to the wall, where she is met by the image of “her mistress in her military clothes inside a gold frame.”^[56] Gender roles are again reversed: the male has lost his sexual organ, and the female has gained the external accoutrements of the male—military garb.

These transformations are perhaps not overly unusual within the narrative context of the book. After all, we have already seen Hamîdû transformed into Hamîda, and the reverse. Why shouldn’t the master lose his male organ and the mistress be outfitted in military gear? The latter case, being a possible allusion to cross-dressing, is especially suggestive. As we will see in our discussion of El Saadawi’s travel memoirs (Chapter 9), cross-dressing is a provocative act in an Arabo-Islamic setting.^[57] Generally in The Circling Song, however, it is not so much the way the body is covered but the essential body parts—that is, the sexual organs—that define one as male or female. The mistress in uniform calls attention to the social gendering of government functions.

Even these, El Saadawi’s novel tells us, are not that easily delimited. When toward the end of the narrative Hamîdû buries his head in his mother’s chest, it turns out not to be the mother at all, but rather the father, whose voice Hamîdû hears saying, “Shame is only washed out by blood.” Hamîdû approaches his father; the father moves back, the light of the lamp revealing his face. The father blows out the lamp, and everything becomes dark. The father trips but regains his footing. Hamîdû screams as a child would, but “his body was not the body of a child.” He pulls out the “metal hard instrument” from his pocket, takes a deep breath, closes his eyes, and shoots his father. When he opens his eyes, he sees the body lying in the sun. Finding a piaster in the corpse’s hand, he takes the money and goes to the store to buy tobacco. He buys a sweet and places it in his mouth. He turns around to leave, but the seller asks him for the piaster. He opens his hand and finds nothing, at which point the seller picks up a stick and runs after him.^[58]

The transformation of the mother into the father who gives the avenging order effects a merging of the adult genders. But it is Hamîdû’s subsequent murder of the father that is most provocative. The paternal body that trips is identical to the anonymous male body that trips as it prepares to violate the young Hamîda in the first rape scene. After the patricide, Hamîdû, taking the piaster from the corpse, intends to use it to buy tobacco (which, as the reader by now knows, is associated with the male), but instead he buys a sweet—which is textually linked to the young Hamîda and her first rape. The fact that Hamîdû is then chased by the seller is parallel to the merchant’s chasing of Hamîda during her initial violation. Hamîdû’s body is as if “nailed to the ground,” as had been the case with his sister.

What does this parallel activity mean? Certainly, there is an identity between Hamîda and Hamîdû, with their roles merging. In one case, the core of the action is the rape of Hamîda; in the other, it is the killing of the father. Are we to understand that Hamîdû was about to be raped, just as his sister was? Possibly. Or do the repetition and parallelism redefine the earlier physical violation of Hamîda, such that the perpetrator of the first rape—the event that sets the entire narrative in motion—becomes the father? This is not an unusual construction in El Saadawi’s literary universe, as we will see in Chapters 5 and 8.

The patriarch, prior to being shot by his son, utters once more the injunction “Shame is only washed out by blood.” Only now does Hamîdû fulfill this order—by killing the father. It is the patricide that will, indeed, wash out the shame of the initial rape. This is not at all what was meant to happen. Hamîdû, by the rules of his society, should have murdered his sister. But as the narrator cleverly puts it, redefining the entire issue, the shame was not Hamîdû’s. He only had to wash it. That is why he is transformed into a servant whose fingers are “ulcerated from the wash water.”^[59] El Saadawi’s feminist narrative has recast the entire problematic: it is not the female victim who must pay with her blood, but the male patriarchal perpetrator of the violation. To put it in political terms, “shame” can be eliminated only by destroying the patriarchal order itself.

And yet, when Hamîdû opens his eyes after being beaten by the seller, “he ascertains that what he saw was nothing but a dream.”^[60] He jumps off the straw mat and runs into the street. There he finds his friends among the neighbor children, playing as usual. They are forming a circle and singing the familiar song about Hamîda and her baby.

The repeating song echoes the repeated paternal command. Both are intertextual intrusions from the popular cultural sphere, in one case a children’s song and in the other a popular dictum.^[61] But the two operate in a dialectical relationship one to the other. The injunction, uttered as it is by the patriarch, represents an older generation; the ditty, sung by the children, represents a newer one. The Circling Song is, on one level, about a coming of age, in which the son must kill the father. This elimination of the older generation, however, is a reality too difficult to digest. Is it a wonder that Hamîdû opens his eyes “and ascertains that what he saw was nothing but a dream.” The Arabic word for Hamîdû’s action, ayqana, contains a sense of certainty, of conviction. No doubt exists for the young man: he did not kill his father, the children are singing their familiar song, the little girl comes out of the circle, the narrator closes the narrative as she began it.

With this declaration of certainty, the narrator reanchors Hamîdû in the real world. This is a literary necessity, since part of his trajectory, like that of his twin sister Hamîda, was peppered with allusions to another world, a world that is not here and now, the world of “that time.” When speaking of the policeman, for example, the narrator uses the word shâwîsh, noting that this was the common name for a policeman “at that time.”^[62] Or when Hamîda buys a “minidress,” the narrator reveals in an aside that this was the dress “common at that time.”^[63] Many are the textual references to “that time.”^[64] An astute reader, especially one familiar with contemporary Egyptian society, will not be fooled by these allusions. The society of The Circling Song is that of the modern-day Middle East. This play with time, however, permits the narrator to indulge in certain games. How could she otherwise speak of the deities whose feet have that “familiar smell” that emanates from unwashed feet?^[65]

Smelly feet turn the deities into corporal entities, not too different from the humans who hold them in awe. At the same time, feet as a body part contribute to creating the genderless universe of The Circling Song. As the narrator puts it, “Feet in childhood are like faces. They have no gender, especially if they are naked feet. Shoes alone are what delimit gender.”^[66] And we already know from an earlier comment by this same narrator that “the faces of children are like the faces of the old: they have no gender.”^[67]

Ungendering the body means denuding it of its sexual allegiance. The narrator of The Circling Song is not unlike her literary cousin, the female physician narrator of Memoirs of a Woman Doctor, who discovered by dissecting the human body that “woman is like man”: “woman has a heart, a brain, and nerves exactly like man.”^[68] Male and female share the same body.

Hamîda and Hamîdû’s corporal saga transcends that of the female physician, however. The body in The Circling Song is not simply ungendered; like the corpses in Memoirs, it is dissected. Whereas the bodies the female physician encountered were those of dead individuals, the situation is not so clear-cut in The Circling Song. There are two types of life, we are told, one that is alive, and one that is dead. Dead life is one in which a human being walks around devoid of bodily fluids—perspiration, urine, and so forth. People who are alive cannot imprison their urine forever, otherwise they will die.^[69] It should not be a surprise then, as we have seen, that dead bodies inhabit the same narrative spaces as live ones in this novel. These assertions open the narrative, as they close it, reaffirming the circularity of the entire process—beginning with the children’s song about Hamîda.^[70]

Hamîda is thus no longer just a child who emerges from a closed circle of her peers in the Egyptian countryside. Along with her twin, Hamîdû, she has transported the reader on a gender journey inspired by deep Arabo-Islamic cultural and mental structures, while at the same time redefining the centuries-old problematic brother-sister duo. Willy-nilly, she has been recast as a hero in another saga, one more dramatic than any mere retelling of the popular honor ballads in El Saadawi’s native Egypt.

It would be easy (though simplistic) to see much of El Saadawi’s fiction as an attack on the male gender. In fact, the parallel trajectories of Hamîdû and Hamîda, the lower-class male and the lower-class female, show how the rituals of blood and shame imprison men and women. Hamîda and Hamîdû, sister and brother, are caught in the same gender web. Their liberation will come about only through the destruction of the patriarch.

Notes

EI² refers to the Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2d ed. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1960–).