8. Prison

A modern-day Shahrazâd, Nawal El Saadawi spins her prison memoirs at night. During the day, we learn, the prisoners are guarded too closely.^[1] How odd that the incarceration saga of this contemporary feminist writer should have so much in common with the literary adventures of her medieval predecessor. Both texts are instigated by a violation. Both female heroes are at the mercy of a male ruler. Both escape death at the end of the narrative. Both tell stories imbued with politics, sexuality, and the body. Both texts are sealed in a family reunion.^[2] Yet the centuries separating Shahrazâd from Nawal El Saadawi are significant. Memoirs from the Women’s Prison (Mudhakkirâtî fî Sijn al-Nisâ’) emanates not from a gilded cage, like that in which Shahrazâd told her stories, but from one of Sadat’s prisons. And unlike Shahrazâd, who willingly takes herself into the wolf’s den, El Saadawi is taken against her will into the cell that will constitute her world from September 6 to November 25, 1981.^[3]

This enclosed world of the prison will help create for the narrator an intimate universe in which women exist as a homosocial unit. In a ground-breaking study, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has cogently argued for the importance of homosociality among males.^[4] Male homosocial desire is a central component of Arabo-Islamic society, and its ubiquity is such that it surfaces in texts of all kinds, ranging from the literary to the philosophical and mystical.^[5] Interestingly, the dominance of male homosociality in Arabo-Islamic discourse is not unrelated to the dominance of male scriptors in that tradition.^[6] With her radical feminist vision, Nawal El Saadawi has simply reversed societal and literary expectations. The prison setting provides a textual opportunity for the creation of a female homosocial environment. The female microcosm, whose inhabitants range from killers and prostitutes to political prisoners and religious conservatives, is pitted against the male patriarchal establishment. The two are, of course, linked: patriarchy creates the female homosocial world through a series of violations. The female hero strikes back from within this space through counterviolations.

While physically confining, the homosocial space of the prison is socially liberating. It permits the female hero-character, Nawal, to manipulate the ideological and social identities of Dr. El Saadawi, the author.^[7] In Woman at Point Zero, the connection between the physician and the prostitute-murderer is blocked by the bars of the prison. Now that the physician is behind those same bars, that social gap can be breached. Again the two characteristic Saadawian female types make their appearance: the middle-class professional woman and her lower-class counterpart. Common imprisonment permits the romantic dissolution of class differences implicit in homosocial bonding.

Dr. Nawal El Saadawi was certainly not unique in being singled out for incarceration by the Egyptian president. While breathing its dying breaths, the Sadat regime imprisoned a great number of intellectuals and political and religious activists. Of course, these intellectuals were both male and female. The Egyptian feminist simply chose to center her text on her fellow women prisoners—who included such long-time acquaintances and friends as Sâfî Nâz Kâzim, Latîfa al-Zayyât, and Amîna Rashîd.^[8]

Though already age fifty, El Saadawi experienced prison as an important rite of passage. Her husband, Dr. Sherif Hetata, had, after all, spent thirteen years of his life in jail for his political convictions. In conversations, too numerous to list, El Saadawi has confessed to me that the prison experience was a crucial part of her own life. It should then perhaps come as no surprise that, though chronologically rather short—only two and a half months—the physical incarceration generated quite a literary legacy. Not only did El Saadawi publish prison memoirs, but she also authored a play based on her carceral experience, The Human Being (al-Insân).^[9] Also subsequent to this incarceration, El Saadawi penned The Fall of the Imam, so heavily inspired by the Sadat regime and its demise.

To be sure, El Saadawi is not the only Arab writer to turn her prison experience into words. The jails of Nasser and Sadat have provided literary fodder for men and women from all walks of political life. The Muslim Brotherhood activist Zaynab al-Ghazâlî, for example, described her prison ordeal under Nasser in the by-now classic bestseller Days from My Life (Ayyâm min Hayâtî). More recently, the well-known leftist Farîda al-Naqqâsh, in Two Tears and a Rose (Dam‘atân wa-Warda), and the equally well-known Muslim revivalist Sâfî Nâz Kâzim, in On Prison and Freedom (‘An al-Sijn wal-Hurriyya), have also written of their incarcerations.^[10]

Distinctive in El Saadawi’s narrative are a number of cross-generic allusions. It goes without saying, however, that such peeks across the border cannot be understood if one does not know the generic ground on which one is standing. Unfortunately, in Arabic literary studies, that is not always the case. In a recent article in a special issue of Mundus Arabicus on the Arabic novel since 1950, one of the better-known scholars and translators of modern Arabic literature writes the following:

The first Arabic novel to be translated was the touching autobiographical depiction of the early village life of a poor, blind Egyptian boy; by the distinguished blind literary critic, scholar and author Taha Husayn, it appeared in English under the title of An Egyptian Childhood.…A second volume of Husayn’s memoirs, telling of his days as a student at al-Azhar, published in Arabic in 1939 appeared in English in 1943 entitled The Stream of Days.…A third part, appearing in Arabic in 1967, that portrays his entry into the Egyptian university and his studies and romance in France, came out in English as A Passage to France.^[11]

Of course, Tâhâ Husayn’s three-volume work is not a novel but an autobiography par excellence. In fact, the concept and limits of autobiography have long posed problems for critics of Arabic literature.^[12]

The same critic also brings us to Nawal El Saadawi, because in the same article he notes that she “has several works in English translation; some of these are extended in length and partly imaginative and are therefore considered to be novels.”^[13] What these quotations demonstrate (aside from the methodological naïveté of their author) is that the novel is considered to be a clearly superior artistic form to the autobiography. Thus a well-crafted autobiography is transformed into a “novel,” while feminist works are labeled novels only grudgingly.

Linguists know that so-called mistakes in popular speech are really the sign of another set of linguistic paradigms seeking to burst through the shell of outmoded rules. Similarly, these generic “mistakes” represent unspoken but erroneous assumptions. The first is that the novel is an artistically superior form to the autobiography, or, to put it another way, that the more literary merit a work has, the more it is a novel. We need to banish the notion that, because autobiography and memoirs purport to talk about true events, literary artifice and literary merit are somehow foreign to them. Second is the misapprehension (also shared by other scholars) that first-person narration marks autobiography, while third-person narration marks the novel.

Admittedly, El Saadawi has not always made the matter easy. As we have seen, her first adult novel, Memoirs of a Woman Doctor, boasts an unnamed first-person narrator who happens to be a physician. It is, however, clearly a novel.^[14] In the English translation of Imra’a ‘ind Nuqtat al-Sifr (Woman at point zero), perhaps El Saadawi’s most-read work, she includes a preface in which she describes her encounter with a female prison inmate, much like the plot of the novel itself.

Memoirs from the Women’s Prison, however, is essentially what its title suggests. The text operates much under the same literary pact that Philippe Lejeune poses for autobiography: identity between author, narrator, and central character.^[15] Yet the work does contain an element of fiction, in that some of the prison inmates are identified by pseudonyms. Their relation to the other historically identified individuals remains ambiguous. Barbara Harlow has called attention to this fictionality in her recent work, Barred: Women, Writing, and Political Detention.^[16] Those who know something about the conditions of El Saadawi’s imprisonment could make a good guess as to the identities of several of these people. I discussed the true identity of these individuals with Dr. El Saadawi, but she asked that this information remain confidential. I reminded her that the religious character in her prison text, who is depicted as wearing the niqâb, does not do so in real life. Dr. El Saadawi’s reply? “It is all right. I have changed a lot of things in the text.”^[17]

Fictionality is not the only literary game that El Saadawi plays in her memoirs. “Because I was born in a strange time…it was not strange that I should enter prison.” Thus, does the first-person narrator, Nawal, introduce her prison memoirs.^[18] It is unfortunate that this introduction was omitted from the English translation of the book, for this birth signals an important literary event. Unfolding before our eyes is a complex and sophisticated narrative that partakes at once of the memoiristic and the autobiographical: memoiristic because the text is a memoir; autobiographical because the birth of the protagonist in this first line could herald an autobiography. In fact, on numerous occasions the text departs from its dominant memoiristic mode to include snatches that function almost as fragments of an unwritten autobiography. This Memoirs from the Women’s Prison has something in common with other of El Saadawi’s works in which, as we saw, suggestions of autobiography peek out from within works in other genres.^[19]

Memoirs from the Women’s Prison is a finely crafted text that goes beyond the prison experience. Although it seems to follow a diachronic mode, beginning with an arrest and ending with a liberation, into this surface diachrony are embedded multiple layers of events. The prison world of El Saadawi is an intricate weave. Descriptions of prison life sit side by side with childhood memories. Killers and prostitutes are made to travel in the same literary universe as political activists and veiled Muslim women. Religion and secular politics inhabit the same textual world. Add to this complexity an attention to the human body and questions of life and death, and one has a literary masterpiece, whose narrative techniques span the spectrum from bisociation to repetition.

One of the most important underlying acts in El Saadawi’s Memoirs from the Women’s Prison is violation. There is violation in the arrest. There is violation in the writing of the memoirs itself. There is even violation in the literary techniques.

It is three o’clock in the afternoon on Sunday, September 6, 1981. Nawal is at home, engrossed in the writing of a new novel. She ignores the repeated knocks on the door. When this is no longer possible, she asks who it is and discovers it is the police. They order her to open the door. She refuses. At last she goes into her room to don a white dress—her “going-out dress”—and begins to walk around the apartment, making an emotional and physical inspection of the locale. Then, she writes, “I heard the sound of the breaking door as though it were an explosion.”^[20]

This breaking of the door by the officials of the Sadat regime is, of course, initially a way for them to penetrate into her house to arrest her. But this act takes on almost mythic proportions as the account unfolds. Barbara Harlow notes that El Saadawi “repeatedly, obsessively, recalls throughout the narrative” the destruction of the door by “the arresting officers.”^[21] But the repetition is more than a mere obsession. It occurs at vital junctures in the text. In the vehicle transporting her to the prison, the officer declares to Nawal that she has exhausted the arresting officers. She thinks back to the intrusion and the breaking of the door.^[22] Upon entering her cell, she declares to her old friend Amîna Rashîd, already an inmate, that her door was broken down.^[23] When Latîfa al-Zayyât takes her turn in the cell, she, too, is informed of this act.^[24] During an official inspection of the prison, Nawal once again remembers the incident.^[25] A letter from home opens with the discovery of the broken door.^[26] When called before a government investigator, Nawal insists on registering the police intrusion and the smashing of the door.^[27] Finally, the death of the Egyptian president, the narrator notes, occurs one month after he sent his police to break down her door and take her to prison.^[28]

Clearly, the breaking of the apartment door is a topos that comes in a way to define the narrator. Yet why does this act of aggression assume such importance? Clearly, we are not dealing here with a simple breaking of a door, whose repetition is merely a literary device. The police penetration into the author’s inner sanctum, her home, is perceived as a violation. It is a metaphorical rape of sorts, which must be exorcised as much as possible in new narrative situations. The fact that she was wearing a white dress accentuates the drama of this “rape” (as in the West, brides in the modern Arab world don a white gown). And the telling of the act becomes as important as the act itself, at once emphasizing it and exorcising it.

This perceived physical violation is compounded by the narrator when she links it to the act of writing. She is absorbed in her novel as the ominous knocks begin. Each successive knock leads to a set of reminiscences, some of which relate to the act of writing. The search of her apartment then reveals the novel. She cries out: “This is a novel…Leave it alone…Don’t touch it.”^[29] The violation has been extended to encompass not just the hero’s home, but her writing as well.

Is it a surprise then that writing should take on its own momentum in Memoirs from the Women’s Prison? Indeed, the very act of writing becomes a violation: a violation of the prison system that would forbid it. The task itself is far from easy. Nawal pens her memoirs at night, on toilet paper and cigarette paper.^[30] The pencil is too short to grasp efficiently. The paper is light and dry. If she presses on it, it rips. If she does not press on it, however, the letters do not appear.^[31] Writing is a trial indeed, difficult because forbidden. The pen is a weapon (silâh).^[32] When the prisoners express their desire to write home, the official reply is that paper and writing instruments are forbidden: “A pistol is safer than paper and a pen.”^[33] As the female prison guard puts it so eloquently to Nawal, the inmate: “A single word written in the political ward is more dangerous than a pistol. Writing is more dangerous than killing, O Doctor.”^[34]

Killing with the pistol, writing with the pen—the officials of the Sadat regime understand their power. To these tools of destruction, however, Nawal adds a third. For the women who inhabit El Saadawi’s prison universe, it is not the pistol that is the most potent instrument of death, but the hoe.

The hoe, according to Harlow, functions “as an agricultural implement, symbolic of the peasant’s vital attachment to the Egyptian land.”^[35] This symbolism is certainly present. Yet the hoe does much more than evoke agriculture. The shâwîsha (female prison guard) graphically describes how Fathiyya the Murderer hit her husband on the head with a hoe, dismembered him, wrapped his body parts in a kerchief, and threw them into the water for the fish to eat.^[36] To return once more to the turâth: This procedure of killing, dismembering, and throwing the body parts into the nearest body of water was quite common in medieval texts, but predominantly with female victims.^[37] The reversal described by El Saadawi is thus all the more stunning. In the contemporary feminist’s text, moreover, this violent act was instigated by Fathiyya’s discovery of her husband having sexual intercourse with her daughter.^[38]

As Nawal looks at Fathiyya, she corporally subsumes her identity, beginning with resemblance and moving to virtual identity. Fathiyya’s brown, strong fingers resemble those of Nawal. The heartbeats of the two women are generated by the “same power.” Nawal’s eyes shine with the “same glitter.” “And my hand, when it grabs the pen, resembles her hand when it grabbed the hoe and struck.” The pen so dear to our prisoner is transposed into a hoe. But this is not enough. Fathiyya’s killing hoe permits Nawal to turn her pen into a killing instrument. She continues by saying that it is as though she were hitting with this pen a black, corrupt head that wanted to violate her freedom and her life, to mutilate her true self, and to make her sell her intellect, to force her to say yes when she wanted to say no. “If my fingers had not known the pen, they might perhaps have known the hoe,” she writes.^[39]

This paradigmatic relationship between pen and hoe is crucial for setting the two tools in opposition to the pistol, the killing instrument par excellence for Sadat’s prison officials. Women, whatever their social class, we learn, do not need a pistol to kill.

How close Nawal the writer has come to being like Fathiyya the Murderer! Is it an accident that Fathiyya acts as the mail courier between Nawal and her family?^[40] The two types of heroes so beloved to this feminist writer are brought together once more, as they were in Woman at Point Zero. In that novel as well, Firdaws, the prostitute hero, kills the male authority figure in charge of her life, her pimp. And there, too, the upper-class physician comes to identify strongly with the lower-class woman.

In fact, this identity in Memoirs from the Women’s Prison between political prisoner and killer is but one facet of a more complex and intimate relationship that exists between Nawal’s colleagues in the prison setting and her family members outside it. Voices, facial features, general behavior—all come together to bridge the gap between the world inside the prison and that outside it. The features of the young prisoner I‘tidâl, are compared to those of Nawal’s daughter.^[41] The Islamist Budûr, in many of her characteristics, is likened to Nawal’s country grandmother.^[42] This grandmother’s singing is indirectly compared to the singing in jail.^[43] The voice of Sabâh the Beggar when she sings reminds Nawal of her Aunt Zaynab’s voice.^[44] The laugh of the shâwîsha is like that of Nawal’s paternal grandmother, a peasant.^[45] The accent of the prisoners from the countryside is like that of the women of “my village,” Kafr Tahla.^[46] Even the physical settings in which these characters interact become identical. The courtyard of the prison reminds the narrator of the courtyard in her grandmother’s house.^[47] As the hero is heading for the official investigation, a colleague hands her a sandwich and tells her she should not go with an empty stomach. “Her voice is like my mother’s voice,” when her mother would give her a sandwich and tell her not to take an examination on an empty stomach.^[48]

Literary comparisons and juxtapositions are never innocent, of course. As prison and village come together, they redefine each other. Village life thus becomes a sort of prison, from which we already know Nawal El Saadawi has escaped.

It is not just the family and the village that provide material for these comparisons. Characters and situations from Nawal’s childhood are resurrected and made to stand alongside characters and situations from her prison experience. Women’s laughter and voices in jail recall those of students in the secondary school. The eyes of the jail inmates resemble those of the young girl’s colleagues at the Hulwân Boarding School.^[49] Officials in the two institutions, school and prison, also bear an uncanny resemblance to one another.^[50] In calling up childhood memories, the narrator alludes to the schoolmistress’s discovery of a “crime” when young girls were found sleeping together in the same bed. Given that we shortly hear of this same schoolmistress’s obsession with sexual improprieties, are we to conclude that the female inmates had sexual relations with one another? The narrator plants the seed and abandons it. In this, she is different from the narrator of the later The Innocence of the Devil, who tackled the question of female homosexuality without hesitation.

The full analogy between the external world and that of the prison comes to fruition when Nawal, returning after her appearance before the government investigator, senses a “strange desire” to see her prison colleagues and feels she is returning to the intimacy of her family.^[51]

Incarceration becomes an alternate family structure. Logically, these comparisons can be read in two ways: family is like a prison; prison is one big family. Neither proposition would be incompatible with Dr. El Saadawi’s thought as it has been articulated in a lifetime of writing. In Memoirs of a Woman Doctor, images of confinement merge with family images. One of the most memorable of these bisociations is that involving the mother’s “imprisonment” of the first-person narrator’s hair in braids.

If we look closely at the comparisons used in the prison memoirs, however, we see that it is the acts of communication and caring—those of a family—that are stressed. In the extensive Saadawian corpus, families are not always presented as positive forces. Heroes like Firdaws in Woman at Point Zero and Hamîda in The Circling Song were abused by family members. The homosocial family unit, we discover, is different. There are no males to abuse the women. And it is this bond of homosociality that helps to diminish the social gulf between Nawal El Saadawi, the internationally famous physician and writer, and the rural lower-class women sharing her incarceration.

Prisoners are more than surrogate family members for Nawal. They interact with one another in complex ways within the prison ward. The prison ward becomes the locus for highlighting, within a clear homosocial environment, the distances and tensions present in contemporary Egyptian society. The most unlikely pair, whose existences the narrator intertwines in a set of savage bisociations, is that of the Islamist Budûr and the leftist Fawqiyya. This is not to say that either of these individuals does not function as a separate character. They do. But it is when Budûr and Fawqiyya are brought together, most often on opposite sides of a given argument, that their two systems of advocacy—religion and politics—are juxtaposed and redefined one in terms of the other.

Religion and politics are not, of course, isolated systems. We have already seen them in literary texts operating as integral parts of the dominant patriarchal structure. But in El Saadawi’s prison memoirs, the advocates of the two systems are painted as intransigent in their positions, increasing the drama of their bisociation. When the prisoners awake in the morning, they exchange smiles and wish one another a good morning. All but Budûr and Fawqiyya. Scowls dominate their faces. While Budûr refuses to laugh, considering it illicit, Fawqiyya is unable to laugh, finding no benefit in it.^[52] Though dissimilar, their convictions are deep-seated: for Budûr, God is the prime mover; for Fawqiyya, economics is the deity.^[53] Their ideological differences do not, however, keep either of them from behaving as bad prison citizens: neither takes care of her bed, neither washes her laundry or her dish after eating, both refuse to bathe in cold water. Both, in short, behave like spoiled brats.^[54]

This parallel behavior turns into a paradigmatic relationship. Nawal’s preconceived notions of prison as solitude and silence are shattered. She cannot “enjoy” either but for a period between midnight and the dawn call to prayer. Anyone who has lived for an extended period in the Muslim world knows that the dawn call to prayer (the first of five daily calls to prayer) is designed to awaken the sleeper. That Nawal should have her sleep disrupted would be but part of the ritual of the dawn call. After all, the muezzin declares that “prayer is better than sleep.”

In the world of the prison, Budûr and Fawqiyya are equally responsible for disturbing the narrator’s peace. No sooner does Budûr stop arguing with her colleagues than she begins to recite the Qur’ân in a loud voice. And when she goes to sleep, Fawqiyya awakens and begins to argue and preach. And when Fawqiyya goes to sleep, then Budûr gets up for the call to prayer. It is as if the two noisemakers, on opposite sides of the politico-religious spectrum, function at times as opposite but related characters. An intimate relationship is created by this narrator between the two types of advocacy: the religious and the political. In her own account, the Islamist activist and writer Sâfî Nâz Kâzim, who was imprisoned with Nawal El Saadawi, notes that she was placed in solitary confinement because the light by which she read the Qur’ân disturbed the other prisoners.^[55] In her Islamic account, religion is light. In Nawal’s secular version, it is noise.

Setting off Budûr, the Islamic militant, against Fawqiyya, the materialist leftist, as equally dogmatic and obnoxious figures is an ideologically curious option. By her life and work, Nawal El Saadawi is far closer to the leftist militant than to the Islamic one; and the placement of her namesake narrator equidistant from and above these two would mislead a reader who did not know the author’s political history. But the prison narrator is not obliged to adopt the public positions of the author. Prison acts as an almost redemptive space, liberating fantasy identifications. Hence the narrator can identify herself with the peasant murderer rather than with the leftist militant. The quasi-occultation in Nawal El Saadawi’s prison narrative of the other well-known political activists (after an initial mention), together with the narrator’s romantic cross-class identification with poor women of the ward, facilitates this realignment.

Through her secular politics, Fawqiyya acts as a foil to Budûr. But politics is not the only domain used to highlight religion. The homosocial environment permits the appearance of other topics dear to Nawal El Saadawi, of which the most important is probably the corporal.

Let us take as an example an incident involving Budûr. Toilet facilities in the ward are described in a graphic (and, needless to say, disgusting) manner. The prisoner using the lavatory would find herself with water dripping on her head from the shower above and with her feet sinking into the sewage water below. A little color was added by the flying cockroaches. On numerous occasions Budûr would enter the lavatory and then immediately jump out again, without “completing her task,” screaming: “Cockroach!” The other inmates, hearing her cry, would run to her, plastic sandals in hand “like the sword, prepared to hit the cockroach.” One day she let out a scream from the courtyard, and, as usual, the rescuers took off their sandals, readying for the impending battle. What they saw was not a cockroach, however, but a man. It turned out that Budûr was not wearing her covering and was terrified that a man might glimpse her hair. From this moment on, whenever her voice would ring out in a scream, her fellow inmates would ask before taking off their plastic sandals: “A cockroach or a man?” Once, running in her haste to cover her hair, she fell and broke a front tooth. On very hot days, Budûr sat with her co-religionists in the courtyard, without their appropriate covering. Each kept one eye on the Qur’ân in her lap and the other on the open area. No sooner would they spot the shadow of a man than they would run inside to cover themselves.

A similar confusion came about, but in an opposite way, in the prostitutes’ ward. There the women would run out uncovering their hair and winking at the men. Thus any man, even a garbage collector, took on great importance, causing an uproar among the munaqqabât, on the one hand, and the prostitutes, on the other.^[56] (A munaqqaba is a woman who dons the niqâb, clothing designed to completely envelop the human body, including the hands which are normally covered with gloves. The only part of a munaqqaba’s body that faces the outside world are the eyes, and those through a slit in the facial covering.)

The lavatory incident embodies many of the elements that not only make El Saadawi’s prison memoirs a good read but also are of concern to the Egyptian feminist. We get, among other things, a glimpse of the prison conditions and of the solidarity of the prisoners, no matter what their religious or political stripe. More than that, the narrator creates sets of connections and possibilities that move outward from the body through religion to male-female relations, the entirety couched in lively imagery. The detailed description of the privy, with the human body hanging, as it were, between two sorts of water—the dripping shower above and the sewage below—and surrounded by flying cockroaches effectively calls attention to the corporal vulnerability of the female prisoners.

Who should be made to enter this space of disgust but the person most concerned with keeping her body private, the munaqqaba Budûr? Obviously, Budûr’s fear of cockroaches is what launches the incident and permits it to function on a literary plane. When the narrator adds as an aside that Budûr runs out without “completing her task,” she calls even more attention to the body as corporality. The comparison of the plastic sandals to swords raises the specter of killing instruments. It is not men who are killed here, of course; it is cockroaches. Nevertheless, although he is not the victim of a killing act, by a process of literary comparison man does become indeed like a roach.

Yet man is more than a possible source of fear. The human male animal is cleverly used to tie the world of the pious Budûr and her religious cohorts to the world of the prostitutes. The human male creates confusion among both groups. True, in one case it is a matter of repulsion and in the other of attraction, but that is almost irrelevant. Both the pious females and the female prostitutes have been linked and redefined under the sign of the male and sexuality.

Why, we might ask, did the privy have to be exploited at all here? After all, the incident that spurs the juxtaposition of these two very different groups of women involved Budûr in the courtyard, not in the privy. Might this be simply a way for the narrator to increase the derision directed at the young Muslim woman? Nawal had already exposed Budûr’s fear of stepping into the lavatory because of the roaches in an earlier episode. And were it not for her constipation, we are told, she might have stayed away forever.^[57] More is at stake here. The bodily functions associated with toilets are, of course, the most private of all corporal activities, and the ones most identified with soiling and various taboos. By linking the munaqqaba to the lavatory, Nawal has taken the corporally very private Budûr and unveiled her in a dramatic way by calling attention to this most intimate aspect of her corporality.

Yet to restrict the significance of the lavatory to Budûr and her anxieties would be misleading and would underplay the larger role that the lavatory plays in El Saadawi’s prison memoirs. The lavatory attaches itself in a fundamental way to the entire project of the memoirs, penetrating to its essence. The toilet (overflowing with sewage and cockroaches) is, on a basic level, the symbol of the unsavory prison conditions, which the prisoners themselves petition to have changed.^[58] We also know that Nawal’s project of writing was itself accomplished partly on toilet paper.^[59]

The lavatory is also the private space for the prisoner. It is there that Nawal reads the letter from her family, and then burns it.^[60] It is there that she listens, glued to the transistor radio, to the news of Sadat’s shooting.^[61] When, during her interrogation, she is offered something to drink “from the buffet,” she thinks back to her time with the Ministry of Health and the close relationship between the drink preparation and the toilet, with flies buzzing back and forth between the commode and the tea cups.^[62]

But it is the lavatory as great social and political equalizer that goes to the heart of the memoirs. Improving the condition of the toilet unites everyone in the prison ward, both veiled women and unveiled ones.

Fortunately, man’s [the word here is al-insân, man, which serves to express the category of human being] bowels do not distinguish between right or left, or one religion and another. No matter how one individual differs from another intellectually or politically, their need for the toilet is one.^[63]

Just as the narrator denuded Budûr and reduced her to her most banal corporality, so it is with all humankind. Intellectual matters, politics, religious affiliation—all these are shunted aside in favor of the corporal. Humans are reduced to their lowest possible common denominator: their bowels. Or, as the narrator of Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale puts it so well: “There is something reassuring about the toilets. Bodily functions at least remain democratic. Everybody shits.”^[64]

We should not be overly surprised at this attention to corporal functions in Nawal El Saadawi’s homosocial universe. She is, after all, a physician; and attention to the body, as we have already seen, has always been part and parcel of her textual creations. Whether in the scientific world of medicine or in the Hamîdû-Hamîda gender games or in the prostitution universe of Firdaws—or, in fact, in any of her narratives—the human body never ceases to be pivotal in Saadawian discourse.^[65]

In prison, however, Dr. Nawal El Saadawi loses her identity as physician and as individual. She becomes a mere number and is not permitted to practice medicine.^[66] That function is assigned to a male, Dr. Sâbir Barsûm. This is not mere literary serendipity. It reinforces the female homosocial aspect of Memoirs from the Women’s Prison. Nawal must not break rank, lest in so doing she break the essential female bonding so central to the narrative.

Nawal, it turns out, recognizes the male physician from her student days at the medical school, and the coincidence of their meeting again is far from a happy one for him, literarily speaking. He, like other male prison officials, receives a nice verbal whipping, as he becomes yet another victim of the prison narrator’s wit. She describes in detail his peculiarities as a student: how he looked, how he walked, how he reserved himself a seat in the front row of the lecture hall, how he looked like a drowning man seeking rescue when he missed a word of the lecture. The other students nicknamed him Sâbir In Shâ’ Allâh because of his habit of beginning every phrase he uttered with the expression in shâ’ Allâh, God willing.

Dr. Sâbir Barsûm does not cut a better figure in the prison. There, it is clear, he functions as an instrument of the patriarchal male government. He also misdiagnoses patients and is so easily bought off that he earns himself another nickname, Sâbir Barsûm Bi-Sijâra—Sâbir Barsûm by a Cigarette, meaning that it took only a cigarette to get him to write almost anything in his medical reports. On the inmates’ urging he is eventually dismissed from their ward. After her release, Nawal spots him on the street and again recalls him as a student, closing this second round of remembrances with the scene of him looking for help like a drowning man.^[67]

The male physician is pitted against the female physician in an environment that is really unkind to both. He is painted as incompetent, while she is not permitted to practice. She is part of the homosocial universe of women, separate from that of the men. The onomastic game is quite interesting. Nawal is careful to explain Barsûm’s two nicknames in the two contexts in which she comes into contact with him. Both appellations are, of course, derisive, designed to take him down a notch or two from his function as all-knowing medical specialist. The name from his school days hints at more. The savvy reader acquainted with the Middle East, upon hearing the name Sâbir In Shâ’ Allâh, will certainly think of that Islamic buffoon Juhâ, who has survived centuries in anecdotes that portray him as, at best, a wise fool.^[68] In one of his more famous stories, Juhâ, setting out to sell a donkey, is asked about his errand. He explains it. His listener admonishes him to use the phrase in shâ’ Allâh. On the way to the market, the donkey is stolen. The next time Juhâ sets out to sell a donkey and is asked about his errand, he inserts an in shâ’ Allâh after every word.^[69] Sâbir Barsûm is not far here from Juhâ himself.

Yet the fact that this physician picks up a nickname even in the jail is significant. On the one hand, that name serves constantly to remind one of his corrupt nature. On the other hand, we know that names in the prison environment are endowed with special meaning. The narrator had carefully explained on an earlier occasion that the crime for which one was incarcerated became attached to one’s name in such a way that it turned into an essential part of one’s identity. Thus there was Fathiyya the Murderer, Fathiyya the Thief, Fathiyya Politics, if the prisoner was accused of being a political, and so on.^[70] With a simple onomastic flip of the pen, then, Sâbir Barsûm Bi-Sijâra—Sâbir Barsûm by a Cigarette—is turned into one of the prison crowd, a criminal not unlike those incarcerated.

This male physician’s trajectory in El Saadawi’s prison narrative is circular. His initial identity is linked to a drowning man, and the same image is repeated with his exit from the memoirs. The physician has been effectively deflated, his existence as a medical professional a mere intrusion in the life of Sâbir Barsûm the student. Despite his necessary presence in the women’s world as healer, he is made to remain outside that world, united as it is by female bonding.

The prison space, though romantic in some respects, is not exempt from danger. In a lengthy introduction preceding the textual entrance of this corrupt physician, the narrator amply discusses the conditions of prison medicine.^[71] Illness in prison, we learn, is “worse than death. It is a type of slow, long death…or death hundreds of times instead of once.”^[72]

In El Saadawi’s memoirs, however, death is not something that merely follows from illness. It is a pervasive state that begins as soon as she enters the prison enclosure. Silence there is compared to the silence of graves.^[73] Going through an opening in a small door becomes the entry into a grave. The white dress here plays its role, not as a symbol of purity, but as the funeral shroud—white being the color of the burial cloth in which a corpse is wrapped in the Muslim Middle East. The hands of the officer helping her are like the hands of an undertaker. The scene feels familiar to the narrator: only later do we learn that it is in fact identical to her mother’s burial.^[74] Death imagery is everpresent in these opening pages. A light voice, for example, seems to emanate from a dead body. When a man stops talking, it is as though he had suddenly died.^[75]

Prison is death. Beyond that, it turns humans into animals, in what seems to be a process of reverse evolution. The prisoners are behind bars like animals.^[76] But this is not simply a literary conceit. The narrator notes that her nails have grown long, like claws. She has not, after all, cut them since entering the jail. One day Nawal looks at her long fingernails in surprise: “Are they my nails or the claws of an animal?” she wonders. Even her hair is like that of a lion. So far so good. Lest the reader think that these animal comparisons are natural, given that neither nails nor hair would have been trimmed, the narrator adds that her nose is like an elephant’s trunk. She has indeed become fully animal!77

What, we might well ask, is next? Death and animality would seem to be the end of our hero, as for the other female inmates.^[78] But salvation is at hand. Sadat’s death in the prison memoirs is not merely the path to liberation for our narrator; it is a transformative act for the entire prison population.

The demise of the Egyptian ruler takes on mythic proportions. Prison, we discover, plays elaborate games with one’s notion of time. Certainly, Nawal is not unique here: Elissa D. Gelfand has demonstrated eloquently that this is a phenomenon one encounters in French women’s prison texts.^[79] For our Egyptian prisoner, incarceration transfers time into non-time; hours stretch without end.^[80] At a certain point, Nawal wonders if she is a child playing in the dirt or a woman locked in prison.^[81] In prison, it is clear, one loses any sense of history and time.^[82]

Sadat’s death will overturn everything. But this political patriarch does not die immediately. His demise comes in stages. First, the inmates hear of the shooting (a radio had been smuggled into the cell). Then they hear that his wound is not mortal. But his shooting alone is enough to effect changes. Budûr, the Islamist, who until now had considered the radio to be an instrument of the devil, wishes to hear the news. The inmates will not be disappointed: the voice announcing Sadat’s death finally penetrates the prison.

All the bodies jumped in the air. The radio fell on the ground and no one paid any attention to it.

A moment outside time, and outside existence, which cannot be felt. Perhaps we lost our five senses, for we could no longer see or hear anything.…

Things around me are going round and round. I grabbed my head. Dream or knowledge? And what is that going round me? The earth? The ward? Or is it I who am going round?

I awoke to a strange scene. Budûr going in circles around herself, without a niqâb and without an outer covering. She is going around and dancing. Surrounding her are the munaqqabât colleagues. Dancing, hair naked, without niqâb or hijâb. The bodies sway with vehemence, the hips bend, the bellies shake, the heads bend, and the hair flies.

And another, stranger scene. Fawqiyya, who had not done a single prayer prostration…I saw her sitting on the ground, lifting her hands on high while she cried out: “I praise you, O lord...” And around her, the other colleagues sitting in prayer.

Calling out in one breath: “We praise you, O Lord.”^[83]

This critical event that is the death of Sadat has transformed the world of the prison ward. When Nawal says that she “awakened” on the two strange scenes, it is as if the announcement of the death had rendered her unconscious or as if she had entered another existence. The other inmates are just as emotionally and physically affected by the demise of the ruler. Once again it is Budûr and Fawqiyya, that duo we have met before, who are the two critical poles for the reactions. There is Budûr, the munaqqaba, for whom control of the body is primary and who had argued that woman should not shake her body.^[84] What has Sadat’s death done to her? Her entire demeanor is the exact opposite of that she has been advocating all along: hair flowing, body shaking. Even more important, she has brought her other munaqqabât colleagues into the scene. As for Fawqiyya, for whom prayer was utterly alien, there we find her practicing that which she has never done before in her life. Her deity is no longer economics but Allâh, the God whom Budûr has worshipped all along. Fawqiyya likewise has gathered around her a group of women who join her in prayer.

These exchanges of behavior are the fulfillment of the romantic blurring of identities in the homosocial pact. But to say fulfillment is to say completion, ending. Sadat’s death closes a cycle. Nawal’s entry into the prison was, after all, a death. The physical assassination of the male ruler becomes a redemptive act that will save her. It is an almost primitive system of justice: a death for a death. She is sentenced to a sort of death from which she can be resurrected only by her imprisoner’s death. His death will allow her to live. The death of a male saves the female from perdition. This is not unlike the autobiography of the contemporary Palestinian poet Fadwâ Tûqân. In Rihla Jabaliyya, Rihla Sa‘ba (translated as A Mountainous Journey), Fadwâ’s birth, an event whose date her mother seems to have forgotten, is linked to the death of a male. She tells her mother: “I will extract my birth certificate [shahâda] from the tombstone [shâhida] of your cousin.”^[85]

The male death as liberation is certainly not alien to the Saadawian literary universe. Numerous are her novels in which the patriarch must be killed. In the prison memoirs, this patriarch is inextricably tied to his own political machine, the state, which itself then functions as a patriarchy. It is the demise of the all-powerful male figure that opens the prison and permits the ensuing liberation. In the process, female homosociality is dissolved in the space between the two violations. A disruption has thrust the protagonist from her ordinary world into the special one of the women’s prison. Like the end of the frame of The Thousand and One Nights, Sadat’s death closes this parenthesis, implicitly restoring the world of before.

The redemptive act of Sadat’s death does more than liberate the hero. It permits the previous violations to be rectified. When Nawal’s door was first penetrated, a violation that set in motion the entire prison experience, she was interrupted in the act of writing. Her novel was discovered by Sadat’s officials. No matter. Nawal El Saadawi will pen her prison memoirs while incarcerated, an act that is a violation of all that the prison officials hold dear. The death for a death has also instigated a book for a book.

Unlike Shahrazâd, with whom she initially seems to have so much in common, El Saadawi sets down her own story. She does not need, as did her predecessor, a male ruler to ensure that her tale is transformed into something permanent, a text. The contemporary feminist generates her own text. This exercise in violation and homosociality has created an object that survives the incarceration—its own text.

Notes

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