9. Dreams of Flying

“What was the dream of my life? I would see myself on a white horse, flying in the air, and in my hand a sword with which I would strike enemies and liberate the homeland.”^[1] Thus does Nawal El Saadawi link the world of travel to that of politics (and eventually gender) in the opening pages of My Travels around the World (Rihlâtî fî al-‘Alam). Like other of her works, her travel memoirs are far from innocent documentaries. The boundaries El Saadawi crosses are not merely geographical, but literary, political, and sexual—making My Travels around the World a text of transgression.

Plenty of Arab women travel. Yet in the popular unconscious of the Arab world, a woman traveling, especially alone, is problematic. Films reinforce this: in the popular Hikâyatî ma‘a al-Zamân, the singer Warda al-Jazâ’iriyya has to be smuggled from Cairo to Beirut in a string-bass case. She does not, we discover, have her husband’s permission to leave the country.^[2]

Nawal El Saadawi not only travels; she also writes about it. In the case of a woman, however, the telling of the act seems almost more illicit than the doing. Yet in textualizing her travel memoirs, the Egyptian physician is following a centuries-old tradition of male travel literature. The idea of travel, of the rihla, was central to medieval Islamic mentalities. Scholars and intellectuals roamed from the eastern to the western borders of that great geographical and cultural expanse that was the world of Islam. The rihla fî talab al-‘ilm, the journey in search of knowledge, was a de rigueur activity and forms part of the biography of most, if not all, prominent medieval Muslim intellectual luminaries.^[3] Many were the male medieval authors who set down their travel memoirs, most often records of their pilgrimage to and from Mecca. The fourteenth-century Ibn Battûta, whose narrative extends from his home country of Morocco to the Indian subcontinent, is perhaps the most famous of these travelers.^[4] Others, like the Andalusian Ibn Jubayr (d. 614/1217), with his pilgrimage account, and ‘Abd al-Latîf al-Baghdâdî (d. 629/1231–1232), who visited Egypt during a great famine, have entered the annals of classical Arabic literature as well.^[5]

Many modern male travelers have gone beyond the confines of the Arab world, and descriptions of their adventures abound. Whether as part of student delegations, diplomatic missions, or as independent travelers, male authors have not shied away from setting down their impressions of the sights and societies they have seen.^[6] Here too, of course, the pilgrimage account still holds pride of place.^[7]

In the contemporary period, the period after all in which El Saadawi flourishes, travel seems to have come within the purview of everyone. Male travel accounts are numerous, some of which are not devoid of a humor, like those of Anîs Mansûr.^[8] At the same time, though the airplane has effectively decreased geographical distances, cultural and religious factors seem to have increased them. One can no longer speak of a purely Arabo-Muslim rihla fî talab al-‘ilm. Travel now includes the Western world, a locus of perdition and danger for some religious Muslim thinkers. Anti-travel guides and memoirs exist, and words of caution against the lure of Western civilization pepper other accounts.^[9]

To understand the power of El Saadawi’s travel account one must, therefore, also understand the discourse on the other side of the cultural divide in the Middle East today. In his book of legal injunctions dealing with women, Min al-Ahkâm al-Fiqhiyya fî al-Fatâwâ al-Nisâ‘iyya, the well-known Saudi religious authority Shaykh Muhammad ibn Sâlih al-‘Uthaymîn responds to a concerned Muslim who wonders: Is it permissible for a woman to undertake the ‘umra (a pilgrimage to Mecca that can be performed at any time, unlike the hajj, which occurs during a prescribed month) without being accompanied by a legal guardian, and may a woman undertake the ‘umra in the company of other women, in lieu of a legal guardian? The Shaykh does not beat around the bush. He seizes the occasion to tackle not only the specific question but also the entire issue of woman’s travel in general, adducing sayings of the Prophet and explaining them to his reader. So far so good.

But Shaykh Muhammad ibn Sâlih al-‘Uthaymîn, like his questioner, lives in a day of planes and long-distance travel. So his answer must extend beyond the bounds of the Mecca pilgrimage per se. He dismisses those who would argue that it is permissible for a woman to travel on a plane without a legal guardian so long as that guardian accompanies her to the airport. The scenarios that can lead to woman’s perdition, he comments, are multiple. For example, the legal guardian who is to take care of the woman on her arrival might be late. Or, on the plane itself, the female traveler might find herself sitting next to a dissolute male who will attempt to take advantage of her.^[10]

Works like that of al-‘Uthaymîn typically occupy the shelves of religiously minded readers. They are, nevertheless, part of the literary and cultural fabric of the contemporary Arab world and North Africa. Nawal El Saadawi’s My Travels around the World functions as a counter-narrative to these admonitions, her travel scenario at times reading like the fulfillment of the Shaykh’s more dire prophecies. Her story reveals different, and feminist, possibilities for the travel experience.

But to talk about travel is not necessarily to write a travel account. Many authors of both genders have talked about travel, of course. Travel narratives are often embedded within autobiography—as in the case of the famous twentieth-century blind male Egyptian modernizer Tâhâ Husayn—where they are subordinated to the autobiography and forced to adhere to its generic rules.^[11] The female Palestinian poet Fadwâ Tûqân discusses her stay in England as part of the larger autobiographical project she undertakes in her Rihla Jabaliyya, Rihla Sa‘ba (Mountainous journey, difficult journey).^[12] The word rihla in this title should not mislead us, however; the journey described is not that of a travel text. In fact, modern Arabic usage now normally dictates that the plural form of the word, rihlât—as in El Saadawi’s title—is a clearer indication of a book’s membership in the travel genre. Even so, such contemporary works as Rihlatî min al-Shakk ilâ al-Imân (My journey from doubt to belief), by the born-again Muslim physician-writer Mustafâ Mahmûd, and Rihlatî min al-Sufûr ilâ al-Hijâb (My journey from unveiling to veiling), by the born-again Muslim female activist Karîmân Hamza, function more as spiritual journeys than physical ones.^[13]

Within this context, El Saadawi’s project becomes even more extraordinary. The very title of her work, My Travels around the World, sets it off from other, more modest enterprises, like Karîma Kamâl’s Bint Misriyya fî Amrîkâ (An Egyptian girl in America).^[14] Modesty is not the key to My Travels. El Saadawi hops from continent to continent, most often as a single woman—a provocation in and of itself. In Paris, she sits in a café and casually sips a beer.^[15] This is at least as incorrect and potentially shocking as the same act would have been in polite Western society a hundred years ago. Even in the contemporary Arab world, woman’s drinking of alcohol is considered risqué. This is, of course, not to speak of the religio-legal injunctions against alcohol, even for men, among religious Muslims generally. Indeed, this action on the part of the single woman traveler might have no real equivalent in the parallel Western discourse. The taboos she is breaking are not only societal, they are also literary.

In a way, El Saadawi has an unfair advantage. She is a physician. She is a writer. She is a feminist activist. Her husband, also a physician and a writer, is a prominent figure in his own right. She gets to conquer in these various guises. She is invited to medical conferences. She participates in literary conferences. And her husband’s work in India permits her to sojourn in, and travel around, that subcontinent.

Nawal El Saadawi the traveler first departs from her homeland to attend a medical conference in Algeria. Then it is on to Europe and the United States. North America is followed by Jordan. A stop in Helsinki and a visit to the Soviet Union and Central Asia come next, and then Iran. A long visit to India and a shorter one to Africa seal the travel account. At times, our traveler plays the role of tourist, at others, that of engagé writer. History, geography, sociology—the curious reader can find ample information in each of these areas to satisfy his or her curiosity.

Yet the first-person narrator of this complex text does not merely jump from place to place, recounting her impressions and reactions. My Travels around the World functions almost as the travel equivalent of a Bildungsroman (a form certainly not alien to El Saadawi’s prose).^[16] When we first meet this intrepid narrator, she is anxious to tell us about her childhood. It is not individuals she meets outside the borders of her homeland with whom she interacts in the first few pages of her travelogue, but family members (including a grandmother whom we shall come to know more intimately below). As the text evolves, the narrator meets her third husband and gives birth to a second child. She exits the memoirs as a United Nations advisor having an interchange with a prominent male African writer.

A Bildungsroman is a novel of development. But as with El Saadawi’s earlier Memoirs of a Woman Doctor,^[17] the hero of the travel memoirs remains nameless, as do the intimate members of her family. The autobiographical pact implicit in a text like My Travels is all that permits the identification of the individual characters with certainty.^[18] The reader familiar with Nawal El Saadawi’s personal life can easily attach names and faces to the sometimes elusive incidents the narrator speaks of. For example: “In the spring of the year 1964, we met. He and I alone. I asked him where he came from. He said: ‘From prison.’ ” This meeting leads to a wedding ceremony attended by the narrator’s daughter.^[19] This “he” is, of course, Dr. Sherif Hetata, who had his share of imprisonment under both King Farouq and Nasser and whose prison experience led to fictional work.^[20] He is the husband whom Nawal will also visit in India.^[21] The young daughter is Munâ Hilmî, now a writer and activist in her own right.^[22]

This onomastic absence, this namelessness, is not insignificant. The normal expectation (though obviously exceptions do exist) in a text of this sort is for the identity of the central character to manifest itself somewhere along the line—as it does, for example, in El Saadawi’s prison memoirs. But it is precisely “identity” that is problematic in My Travels around the World: gender identity, racial identity, national identity. As this quasi-Bildungsroman progresses, as the narrator moves around the world, her sense of identity becomes stronger. True, she never acquires a name, but at least the reader concludes the text with a sense of who she thinks she is.

The prelude to the actual travel text posits this problematic. When Nawal told her grandmother her dream of flying in the air on a white horse and liberating the homeland with a sword, the grandmother responded:

—These are not the dreams of girls.

—And what do girls dream of, Grandmother?

—They dream of a husband and a wedding dress.

—But I did not ever dream of a husband and a wedding dress.^[23]

Nawal’s grandmother had bought her a wedding dress “ten years before the coming of the groom.” And on every holiday, her father would bring Nawal a new dress and her brother a gun and a small mechanical airplane. On one occasion, spotting the fancy silk dress in its gift box, she screamed in anger:

“I want an airplane and a gun like my brother.”

But my mother said: “You will be pretty in the new dress.”

I shouted: “I don’t like dresses.”

My grandmother yelled out: “This girl should definitely have been a male.”^[24]

Nawal would look up at the sky with the eyes of a ten-year-old child. “Will a day come when I will ride an airplane?” she would muse. “Can I fly in the air like a bird, far from this prison into which I was born?” Our narrator continues:

In the dream, I used to fly without a plane. My body would rise in the air, and I would fly over the roofs of houses, the top of trees, and the oceans.…

My grandmother would say: “Flying in dreams means success and you will marry an emir or a prince.”

I would yell into her face: “I hate the king and I hate marriage.”^[25]

Her grandmother would then angrily declare that she was as crazy as her mother. But her mother, Nawal is quick to add, hated King Farouq, whereas her grandmother hated only the British and would sing with the radio: “King of the Land, O Beautiful One, O Farouq, O Light of the Eye!”^[26]

These outbursts by the young Nawal are not simply temper tantrums. Their literary function is to set the stage for the account to come. The young girl is being brought up in a traditional manner. When she has dreams that girls “do not have,” she is informed of this fact. Nawal and the grandmother are both undaunted. When the latter hears the second dream, she understands it as a supernatural sign: flying means success. The grandmother, with this interpretation, is inserting herself into an oneiric system that is centuries old. She interprets the dream as it is interpreted in dream books that use the classical oneiric tradition as a base.^[27] But for the young Nawal, a dream is the exact opposite: rather than something unreal to be interpreted, a dream is something tangible to be fulfilled.^[28]

The girl’s desire for male-defined gifts finally leads her grandmother to exclaim that she should have been a male—not a boy (walad), but a male (dhakar). With this word choice she goes to the heart of an issue dear to Nawal El Saadawi and one we have seen her develop amply in other work. The problem in essence is the conflict between the young girl and her brother. In Memoirs of a Woman Doctor, for example, the hero finds herself, from the opening of the text, in rebellion against her femininity (unûtha). In that novel, it was a corporal prison that the Saadawian character was attempting to escape.

Here, when the narrator wonders, “Can I fly in the air like a bird, far from this prison into which I was born?” the prison is extended from the corporal to the social. Females simply do not do what she wants to do. Their dreams are not hers. Airplanes and guns are not supposed to be substituted for frilly dresses. Otherwise, one is not a girl but a male.

That Nawal refuses to be a victim of this sort of thinking becomes even more definite when, on her return from New York, she buys a gift for her daughter: a toy plane, blue with delicate white wings. At the Cairo airport, a clumsy Egyptian official shakes the gift so hard that it falls out of his hand. “The delicate wings scattered like a white butterfly on the asphalt.”^[29] Nawal’s attempt to break with custom and give her female child the male gift of an airplane is met with failure at the hands of a male government official.

Breaking custom is not as easy as having a dream. But of course, we know that Nawal will fulfill the dream of flying. Even though the fulfillment does not come about until long after her fiery exchanges with the grandmother, nevertheless, the literary placement of the fulfillment is directly after them. From hearing her grandmother’s singing along with the radio, Nawal goes on to hear the sound of her own new black shoes as she walks in the Cairo airport “as though it were yesterday.”^[30] Time has been encapsulated: from childhood we have jumped directly to the adult Nawal battling her way through the airport formalities. The reader now knows for certain that the grandmother was talking rubbish. Nawal’s message is clear: forget the dreams that girls are “supposed” to have, forget the traditional interpretations—breaking through the societal gender roles would appear to be easy.

Or is it? At the airport, a police official confronts the traveling Nawal. She may well have the state’s permission to leave the country, but where is the husband’s? She remembers that she is not married and informs the officer of this fact. He demands proof. She pulls a long sheet of paper out of her purse, which he examines.

“Why did you not say from the beginning that you were divorced [mutallaqa]?” (He pronounced it with the a after the l.)

I said angrily: “I am not mutallaqa (with an a after the l). But I am mutalliqa (with an i after the l)!”^[31]

By changing the internal vowel on the word mutallaqa (divorced), Nawal has transformed it from passive to active. The woman is no longer the one who is divorced; she is the divorcer. It was fortunate for the traveling Nawal that the government official, looking at her with eyes like those of “an imprisoned animal,” simply stamped her passport in response to her philological correction, allowing her to actually fly. The airplane is now no longer the object of dreams but a reality that will transport the narrator and eventually help to create the travel memoirs.

Although the grandmother was wrong about flying and airplanes, she did make a gender-related statement that is significant. “This girl should have been a male,” the old woman had declared. Of course, there is no question about the female identity of the narrator of My Travels around the World. She is a woman. Yet there are elements and episodes in the text that complicate gender issues. There is identity with males, and there is cross-dressing.

In the Cairo airport, Nawal stands in line. Behind her are a number of foreign men and women. Obviously wealthy, they are tall and stand with their heads upright and their back muscles taut. Nawal’s response? She lifts her head and tightens her back muscles. She is tall, like the men; “Their women are shorter than I.”^[32] The descriptions the Western women receive are far from kind. The Egyptian traveler’s instinctive response is to identify with the male of the species. It helps that she herself is tall, permitting her to distinguish herself from the foreign women.

Nawal El Saadawi is by no means advocating a universe in which women should become men. Far from it. Simply, she seeks to expose and subvert the gender boundaries that dominate the thinking of most societies. On her way to the Jordanian front during the 1967 war, she explains that she had learned to shoot arms in 1956, during the Port Said incidents. She was a physician in the countryside, in Tahla, and the medical facility was turned into a military camp training people to either fire arms or nurse the wounded. She decided that rather than dress bandages she would carry arms. She learned to fire and hit the target. The military instructor was so surprised that a woman could do this on a first try that he began to call her “Captain,” in the masculine, as a way to express her superiority. But Nawal refused the title of a man and held on to her name. The instructor was surprised.

“But this is an honor for you when we endow you with the name of a man.” So I called him by the name of a woman, and he got angry. But I said in surprise: “But this is an honor for you when we endow you with the name of a woman.”

He responded by lifting his gun and pointing it at her head. So she lifted her gun and pointed it at his head—whereupon he immediately backed off. The moral of the story for the female physician? Men understand only weapons, and weapons can be defeated only with weapons.^[33]

The lesson here is clear. Nursing the wounded is woman’s domain. Yet it does not need to be so. Indeed, a woman may not only learn to shoot weapons, but she may be excellent at it, so much so in fact that the male of the species is willing to turn her into an honorary male. Performing a male activity, however, does not mean becoming a man. Simply, a woman should learn to operate in the domain of the opposite gender.

These incidents take gender barriers to task. When Nawal travels to Thailand, she actually crosses this most intractable of societal and physical boundaries. The trip to Thailand, subsumed under the larger section on India, is a trip Nawal takes with her husband. Outside their hotel, her husband is unable to get rid of a man offering him a beautiful woman for the night. She finally says to him: “And don’t you have a beautiful man for me tonight?” The man is frightened and dashes off.^[34] So far so good. Clearly, Thailand is certainly living up to its reputation as one of the world’s sex capitals.^[35]

But Nawal is (fortunately) incapable of leaving well enough alone. She is fascinated by the “massage houses,” the euphemism for houses of prostitution. A specialist explains to her that the houses outnumber the tourists and that competition among them is severe. Each house therefore hires a number of “tourist guides,” whose job it is to entrap the tourists and lure them to the massage parlors. She would see these men standing in front of the hotels and on the streets repeating their come-ons and peddling their wares.^[36] “The desire to know or the desire to explore overcame me. I want to see one of these houses from the inside. But it is forbidden for a woman to enter,” our narrator muses. The only exception is if she works as a masseuse. The woman’s role is to present the service or the product; consuming is the right of man alone.

So I put on men’s clothing and entered. An insistence on knowing and ripping aside the curtain from the unknown.

The backs bend in front of me with humility. The slit eyes examine me with utmost respect. For the first time, I realized the meaning of being a man. That any movement can be turned into great respect, even if it is the movement of the two legs on the way to the nest of prostitution.

I lifted my head haughtily and imagined that I was a man.

Then I found myself standing between rows of men with white faces imbued with red. Our wide shoulders sticking to one another. Our feet touching. Our eyes fixed forward.^[37]

An intellectual curiosity drives the female narrator to transform herself externally into a male. How does she acquire men’s clothing? We do not know. Nor does she tell us. Yet in that one sentence—“I put on men’s clothing”—she has changed the gender dynamics of the travel narrative. She is now a man. The use of the first person allows this transformation to take place without undue grammatical difficulties. The social advantages of this transformation become quickly apparent: a man is treated with greater respect.

Nawal has no problem fitting into this male role. Identity in gender, especially of the male kind, obliterates all other differences. The male faces surrounding her are white; the reader knows from earlier references that her own complexion is dark.^[38] But this color difference does not stand in the way of her physical integration into the male group: her skin color is not mentioned. Instead she becomes one with the surrounding males. Now she can speak as a member of the group, and the first-person plural pronoun dominates the narrative: “Our wide shoulders sticking to one another. Our feet touching.” Her entire body, from top (the shoulders) to bottom (the feet), has merged with that of the others. Her corporal entity as a female has been dissolved into the male unity. It is no longer in question. We have passed beyond simple cross-dressing into the shady area of male identity. Our narrator no longer has to imagine that she is a man. For the purposes of the text, she has become one.

What better activity, then, for our transvestite narrator to indulge in than that of the male gaze? The eyes signal this scopic activity initially: “Our eyes fixed forward.”^[39]

Rows of young girls sitting in front of us, behind a glass pane as though they are small animals imprisoned inside a glass cage, like the products displayed behind the windows of stores. We see them without their seeing us. The legs are naked, white. The bosoms are protruding, with a number fastened over them. Like the numbers of prisoners inside a cage. The eyes of the men widen in stares, settling on a bosom, or a leg, or a thigh.^[40]

The collectivity of the “we” begins to examine the merchandise. The one-way mirror makes it clear that the male scopic activity can go on undisturbed by a female gaze that might answer it back. And what better way to express the notion of woman as object than to have the prostitutes displayed like merchandise with price tags on them? The locution “the legs…the bosoms” detaches these corporal parts from their bodies and persons. The female narrator practices the male gaze herself, by speaking in the “we” long enough to convince the reader that the gender boundary has been effectively crossed.

Nawal soon breaks rank with her male cohorts, however, eliminating the use of that enveloping first-person plural pronoun. This occurs at a critical moment in the narrative, when the generalized male gaze is transformed into a specific body part: the eyes of the men widening in stares.

But the breaking of rank does not mean the elimination of the scopic. In fact, the opposite occurs. Nawal is now engaged in the ultimate game with the gaze. Her activity becomes the truly voyeuristic one, as her own literary gaze moves back and forth between the male performing the scopic activity and the “caged” female who is its object. Nawal’s game is complex. She is faced with several choices: she can describe the men directly, she can describe the women directly, or she can describe the women as seen by the men. For the reader, this procedure is not clear-cut. Initially, the eyes of the men run over the female bodies “like pieces of glass over the soft complexion, white like the color of chalk.”^[41] This is a violent image. Normally, pieces of glass being run over skin would cut it. And there is a cutting of sorts of the female bodies, as they are scopically dismembered by the male gaze that moves from body part to body part, isolating each in turn.

But then, from the male eyes the narrator moves to the faces of the females. Their chalklike complexion gives them “the faces of dolls made of white plaster.”^[42] From the inanimate faces, Nawal continues to their cheeks and to their eyes.

The eyelid rises for a moment and the glance looks down furtively. A glance filled with emptiness resembling sadness. Or with sadness resembling emptiness. Then the glance disappears quickly.^[43]

Although female eyes may be matched by male eyes, it is clear that the male gaze is still the stronger of the two.

This exchange of unequal parts is, of course, effected by the narrator, and is but a part of that intricate game with the gaze. The complexities are visible in an eloquent passage involving the three levels of description.

Their [fem. plur.] bodies are thin, small like the bodies of children. The sizes of the men are big, bulky like rhinoceri or dinosaurs. Their [masc. plur.] eyes are open, gazing or staring. Full of alertness, attention, and precision. They examine the head, the nose, and the lips. Then they descend to the neck and the two breasts. Then the stomach and the two thighs. Then the two legs and the two feet.

Their [fem. plur.] feet are small, minute like the feet of swallows. Did they place the foot from childhood in iron shoes, like the Chinese?^[44]

Initially, it is the narrator’s seemingly objective evaluation that the reader encounters: the bodies of the females (compared to children) versus those of the males (compared to ungainly beasts). The male eyes, which are at first the object of the narrator’s description (open, gazing or staring), quickly enough begin their own action and trajectory: the examination of the female bodies. The narrator then metaphorically travels along with them as they descend from the head to the feet. At this point, the female bodies become one, as the eyes of the male traverse their various body parts, expressed linguistically as one body: a head, a nose, lips, a neck, two breasts, a stomach, two thighs, two legs, two feet. The individual females have become more effectively objectified, losing their identity as the plurality of their bodies becomes expressed in the singular. The singular body that is described at this point is the object of a doubly scopic activity: that of the narrator mediated through the male customer.

That it is the male gaze that is transforming the multiple bodies into one is made clear when Nawal, shifting the scopic activity, moves from the two feet that are the property of one corporal entity to the plurality of feet that expresses a number of individuals. “Their feet are small, minute like the feet of swallows.”

We are no longer dealing—if we ever had been—with the simple one-way mirror of the massage parlor. The narrative mirror is a two-way, even a three-way mirror. From a direct description of both males and females, Nawal has moved to a description of the females as seen through the male eye, and then back to direct description of the women.

This narrative hesitation, this ability to move the critical gaze between the gaze of the male and that of the female, is perhaps but an external sign of the hesitation in gender role of our cross-dressed narrator. Is she a man or is she a woman? When Nawal sees a tall man suddenly lift his hand and point to a number, she watches as the chosen girl moves along a corridor toward a closed door. She opens the door, and the man enters behind her. Then the door is closed.

I stood confused, hesitating. Do I lift my hand and point or do I not lift my hand? Perhaps my hand moved (by reason of hesitation) with a sign that attracted attention.^[45]

One of the men bows to her with great respect and asks: “May I do something for you? Would you like something, Sir?” “No. Thank you,” she replies. She has forgotten that her “voice was not the voice of a man.” The man is utterly taken aback, loses his look of respect, and escorts her to the office of the director.

The term “Sir” reminds the reader that, despite the games she has been playing with the gaze, Nawal is still functioning socially as a man. Witness her own hesitation when she sees one of her male cohorts point to a young girl. This is the true unspoken question of the narrative: What might have taken place but did not?

Ultimately, however, it is Nawal’s voice that brings about her demise as a man and that ends her unusual search for knowledge. “I had forgotten that my voice was not the voice of a man.” The reader may well wonder also: Was the narrative voice we have been hearing here the voice of a man all along? Does this mean that the narrative we have been experiencing is that of a man? Clearly, the issue is complicated. For one brief moment, Nawal has envisaged herself a man and has attempted to transmit that sense of identity to her reader. Fundamentally, of course, she remains female. Perhaps, had she called for a prostitute, she might have extracted yet another story, one that might have led her to more fictional creations à la Firdaws.

It is not the absence of the prostitute that should, in fact, grab the reader’s attention but that of the husband. Where is he during this escapade? And, what was he doing, after all, in Thailand in the first place, since he appears in the beginning only eventually to disappear from the narrative?

A travel account, like an autobiography, is a literary text, as constructed and as sophisticated as a fictional form. Elements and characters fulfill functions and have roles to play. Nawal’s husband is no exception here. His presence in Bangkok facilitates the creation of the discourse on prostitution. After all, he is accosted a number of times in the street with offers of “a beautiful woman” for the night. Nawal attempts to reverse and subvert this dominant male-centered discourse by asking for “a beautiful man” for the night. Of course, she will not get one. Instead, her curiosity and desire for knowledge drive her, disguised as a man, to a house of prostitution. Her narrative in the massage parlor testifies that, in fact, the “beautiful woman” does not exist. Women in this society have been turned into caged animals, small birds, to be consumed by the giant rhinoceri and dinosaurs, men. Nawal’s last words before she donned men’s clothing were: “As for consumption, it is the right of man alone.”^[46]

Thailand is neither a Middle Eastern nor a Muslim country. The brothel scene reminds us—if we needed reminding—that in the Saadawian conception, women’s oppression is a universal, not a local, phenomenon.

Nawal’s intrusion into the massage parlor earns her the fury of its director. She has crossed a gender barrier, a shocking act even in a sex capital like Bangkok.^[47] It is not the entry into the forbidden world of the brothel that is shocking in the context of modern Arabic letters. From the Nobel Laureate Najîb Mahfûz to his fellow Egyptian Yûsuf Idrîs, accounts of prostitution and even the accompanying erotic display of the female body are not uncommon.^[48] What violates the expectations of the modern Arabic reader is the mode of entry and description. For in this incident in Thailand, Nawâl has done more than simply don men’s clothing. She has altered her behavior, even if only partially, to conform to male behavior and, hence, partake of male scopic activity.

Of course, Nawal did not invent cross-dressing. A long tradition of transvestism exists in the West, as Marjorie Garber demonstrates in Vested Interests.^[49] Seen in Middle Eastern terms, however, cross-dressing is all that much more radical. It is not that transvestism does not exist. It does, but predominantly from the medieval period. Ample examples of cross-dressing on the part of both genders can be found in the literature, including The Thousand and One Nights. In the contemporary Arab world and North Africa, Tahar Ben Jelloun’s novels L’enfant de sable and La nuit sacrée stand as particularly expressive texts of cross-dressing and the power of gendered clothing.^[50]

From a religious Muslim perspective, however, transvestism was clearly shunned, and the Prophet Muhammad admonished against it amply. And despite the passing of centuries, the issue remains the subject of frequent condemnation today among religious-minded individuals of both genders, surfacing not only in guidebooks addressed to women but also in those by-now familiar legal injunctions promulgated by male religious authorities. These voices warn not merely against women wearing men’s clothing but against their behaving like men as well^[51]—which is precisely what Nawal did in the brothel.

This trespass is perhaps the most daring of Nawal’s acts of violation. It reinforces the sense that My Travels around the World is about breaking bounds. One must cross all sorts of barriers, the narrator seems to be telling us, to acquire that precious commodity called knowledge. The Iranian odyssey represents for the narrator another opportunity to transgress—this time not without a price.

November 1968. Iran before the revolution. Nawal is on a scientific mission, attending a medical conference in Tehran. Once again it is “knowledge” that drives the narrator outside the official confines of her visit, in search of Iranian writers. Looking for a literary figure, however, is not the same as investigating the seamier aspects of prostitution.

Nawal’s efforts begin at the university, where she is told that the best writer in Iran is the dean of the Faculty of Letters. She buys a notebook and goes to meet him in his plush office. She sits with him for half an hour without registering a single word on literature. This is obviously a false lead. A more fruitful one is with a group of young university students who direct her to the famous writer Jalâl Al-e Ahmad. She meets him and his wife, Sîmîn Dâneshvar, at the time a professor at the University of Tehran and a writer as well. Nawal is very comfortable with these two intellectuals; “I feel as though I were in my home in Egypt.”^[52] The conversation gravitates around politics and literature.

Two years later, in 1970, Nawal is once again in Iran for a medical conference. Penetrating the country this time is a challenge. The Iranian embassy in Cairo denies her a visa. Officially she is told that the refusal is the act of the Iranian government. Unofficially, a sympathetic young man working in the press section of the embassy reveals to her as she is leaving the grounds that the Shah’s secret service wrote reports against the article she published two years earlier in the Egyptian weekly al-Musawwar. “What article?” she wonders. The young man informs her that it is the piece she wrote on Jalâl Al-e Ahmad, in such and such an issue of the journal, with such and such a date. She is surprised at his precision, since she herself has forgotten the article. But the young man smiles: he liked her article, he is a fan of Al-e Ahmad, who is his favorite writer, and he was very saddened by his death. Nawal jumps: “ ‘He died?’ He said in a low voice: ‘Yes. Under obscure circumstances.’ ”^[53] Nawal later confides in a male medical colleague, whose response is to laugh “with the sarcasm of physicians” and say to her:

“You are a physician. So why do you write and make problems for yourself? There it is, one article, that will prevent you from traveling to Tehran and attending this important world conference.”^[54]

Nawal decides to attend anyway, taking one of the conference’s advisory statements to heart: those who cannot get a visa in time can get one at the airport in Tehran upon arrival. This decision is not an easy one. Our hero worries that the embassy might notify the airport authorities in Tehran. What if she is permitted to enter and then arrested in Tehran? “Why do I expose myself to danger without cause?” she wonders.^[55] She nevertheless enunciates an answer to this rhetorical question: she is attracted by danger.

The word obscure in the young man’s characterization of Al-e Ahmad’s end has also excited her imagination. She needs to know. In Tehran, the Egyptian traveler meets Sîmîn Dâneshvar once again and hears the story of Jalâl Al-e Ahmad’s death while on vacation on the coast of the Caspian Sea. He had just finished exercising, and his wife was reciting him some poetry. He then placed his head on a pillow “and was silent forever.”^[56]

Nawal attends conference proceedings and spends a great deal of time with a woman she encountered on the previous trip, Mânî. The latter explains the dangers inherent in political activity under the Shah and tells Nawal about torture in the prisons.

It is now June 1984. Nawal is in London meeting with some Iranian youths who fled the Khomeini regime. She finds out that her friend Mânî was a victim of Khomeini’s prisons. At the end of her meeting in London, she is convinced that “another revolution will take place in Iran.”

Compared to Thailand, the Iranian journey does not at first seem to represent a radical crossing of boundaries. But in fact, the frontiers our traveler traverses are more real and potentially more life-threatening than in the Thai case. After all, she goes against Iranian government regulations that forbid her entry into the country by arriving at the Tehran airport without a visa. She is gambling with her life, and the gamble pays off.

The Iranian case also reminds us that My Travels around the World is, first and foremost, a composed narrative. The narrator chooses events and arranges information in ways that serve the agenda of the text. The denial of the visa by the Iranian embassy in Cairo is one such example. At first, all we know is that the hero has been refused entry into Iran. Is there some sinister reason behind this action on the part of the Shah’s regime? Only when the young man mentions this forgetful narrator’s article on Jalâl Al-e Ahmad do things become clear. Obviously, the Iranian government did not like what Nawal El Saadawi had to say. Nor does the narrator volunteer anything about what she might have discussed in this occulted article.

This is apparently a game of selective memory, in which the purpose is to conquer new frontiers. The first trip to Tehran involves some sleuthing on Nawal’s part to find Iran’s most famous writer. Her unsuccessful meeting with the dean of the Faculty of Letters is a savage commentary on official government culture. It is only in the popular student hangout that she gets the lead on Al-e Ahmad. And let us not forget that the formal purpose of her first visit to Tehran—as of the second—is medicine. The familiar conflict between medicine and literature is lurking, with medicine being upheld and literature derided by a male physician. Yet on both occasions, Nawal breaks away from the medical congress and explores on her own. Literature, too, demands that frontiers be crossed.

Literature and gender: two seemingly different areas that are conquered in different geographical settings, Iran and Thailand. Yet the two conquests are brought together by this astute narrator not under the sign of “knowledge” generally, but under knowledge of a specific sort. The word obscure in reference to Al-e Ahmad’s death excites the narrator: “I must know. And desire for knowledge is like the sinful [or wicked; âthima] fruit that Eve ate and then had Adam eat from.”^[57] In Thailand, when Nawal is taken to see the director of the massage parlor, they engage in a battle of wits. When he tells her that he is a Jew and believes in the Old Testament, she replies that she thought that Buddhism and Hinduism were the only religions there. The man responds by saying that it is his right to call the police. “Naturally,” she answers.

“It is your right. For you have caught me in the act [in flagrante delicto] of sinful desire, ‘desire for knowledge.’ And God cursed Eve in the Old Testament because she ate from the tree of knowledge.”^[58]

Both sorts of knowledge have now been cast together as wicked and forbidden. It may be more familiar to see cross-dressing and the entire episode in the massage parlor in this light, less so the Iranian case, but that is not for us to judge. The fact is that by referencing Eve and the forbidden fruit in both episodes, Nawal automatically juxtaposes and reinterprets the two, one through the other. Both represent hidden knowledge, and both become illicit activities.

The chapter on Iran is entitled “Iran before the Revolution.” Yet, the epilogue to the chapter encompasses the post-Khomeini revolutionary period and takes place in London. Hence, Nawal does not actually enter the Middle Eastern country for this section; then again, the title of the chapter does not specifically speak of travel, as it might have had it been, for example, “Journey to Iran before the Revolution.” The entire notion of a journey delimited by a geographical locus disappears, leaving one with an emphasis on the state of the country rather than the physical trip there. There is, however, a thread unifying the two trips to Iran and the epilogue in London, a thread combining literature, political activism, and the power of the writer.

The Iran episodes make it clear that travel is a fairly fluid concept. In fact, My Travels around the World presents the reader with various possibilities. The notion of entry into a place shifts meaning throughout the book. Sometimes the narrator describes the journey itself, right down to the plane ride, airport formalities, and so forth, before entering a specific destination. This is the case with Thailand.^[59] At other times, a political situation instigates the physical trip, which then becomes subordinated, if not occulted. This is the case with Nawal’s visit to the Jordanian front following the June 1967 war.^[60] At still other times, the narrator delves directly into the description of a country without any evocation of a journey, as is the case with Finland.^[61]

Europe, Asia, America—all precede the continent of Africa in the chronological world view of the African narrator. Yet Africa holds pride of place for Nawal because her own identity is so intimately tied to that locus. Another part of her identity—this time as a mother—is linked to New York, the city in which she gives birth to her son.^[62] And in Paris, a young girl tells the narrator that she is beautiful (“Vous êtes belle, Madame”), a phrase the Egyptian traveler repeats to herself as she contemplates her own physical appearance and skin color:

On every trip outside the homeland I would be surprised. My face always appeared more beautiful in the plane mirrors than in the mirrors in my house or in other mirrors in the homeland.^[63]

Egypt may be part of Africa, but that does not stop Nawal’s family and school colleagues from making fun of her physical appearance. Her dark complexion is a particularly sensitive point. Her aunt even bought her white powder with which to hide her dark skin.^[64]

The trip to the African continent will clarify all this as it will shed a new light on the sojourn in America. The narrator muses on her belated discovery of Africa, even though it is “our continent”:

But our eyes and faces were always facing the Mediterranean, Europe, and America, with our backs toward Africa, toward ourselves. When someone turns his back on himself, when one is ashamed of one’s brown or black complexion and attempts to hide it with white powder, how does he know himself?^[65]

This is clearly a very personal declaration for Nawal. Her sojourn in Africa lasts three months, “a short time to enter into the heart of the African human being [insân], but it was enough for me at least to enter into my heart, to get to know myself and my being African.”^[66]

This trip to the African continent is perhaps the most important of the voyages of discovery for the narrator.

I still remember, despite the passing of years, that from the moment I was born I realized two truths in which there is no doubt. The first of them is that I am a girl and that I am not a boy like my brother. The second of them is that my skin is dark and not white like my mother’s. And with these two truths I realized something else even more important: that these two characteristics by themselves and without any other defects would be enough to cause failure in my future.^[67]

The journey to Africa thus facilitates an internal salvation of sorts for the hero as she begins to feel comfortable with herself and her own skin color. The sense of familiarity she experiences gives her a chance to think back to a trip she made to North Carolina in 1965 and to an incident she “does not forget”: finding herself facing segregated restrooms, one for whites and another for blacks.^[68] We had already heard about a similar event in her account of the trip to the United States. When telling of the incident in its American context, she notes,

I stood in front of the mirror, looking intently at the color of my skin. I did not know which of them [the two doors] to enter. Then I entered through the door of “the coloreds” [al-mulawwanîn].^[69]

In the context of the African experience, however, the event changes.

That day, I stood in front of the mirror, confused. Which door do I enter? The color of my skin was not white or black, but a middle color between white and black. And I did not know to which world I belonged, to the world of the whites or the world of the blacks.^[70]

Are these the same events or different ones? The narrator tells us that she will never forget the incident in question. The inconsistency, if such it is, rests in whether or not she actually entered the restroom. The specific facts of the matter may not be crucial. What is important is that in Nawal’s discourse, American racism is set off against African identity. In the American version of the story, she enters by the door reserved for blacks. Any hesitation would have shed doubt on her African connection, which by the time she pens the account is a certainty in her mind. In a sense, she had to enter by the “colored” door, not to instill a message about her identity, but to strengthen the discourse on American racism. The hesitation in the African variant of the story serves a completely different purpose. In Africa, Nawal learns to accept her dark skin and her African identity. The hesitation, rather than eliminating that identity, is an important step on the way to finding it.

The repetition of this obviously important incident reinforces the political allegiance of Nawal El Saadawi’s travel text. All her visits, in fact, have a political tinge, when they are not strictly defined by politics, as the visit to the Jordanian front clearly is. She visits Lenin’s tomb, she meets with Indira Gandhi, she denounces imperialism.^[71]

But it is perhaps the regime of her political bête noire, Anwar Sadat, that comes most under attack. Once again, it is the wealth of the African experience that allows Nawal to enrich her political discourse and attack the Egyptian political system. Chapter 9 of My Travels around the World is entitled “Haile Selassi and the Revolution.” This chapter, however, opens with a denunciation of Sadat’s rule and the internal situation in Egypt. Under him, she writes, “I feel I am in exile in my own country.…Things reversed themselves in our lives. Danger became security. And freedom, dictatorship.”^[72] It is, however, the effects of Sadat’s famous economic open door policy (infitâh) that the narrator dwells on:

And we began to see beer and Israeli eggs in the Egyptian stores. A flow of American advertisements poured out for Kent cigarettes and Seven-Up and Schweppes and artificial eyelashes.

The national products disappeared from the market.^[73]

This Egyptian introduction to Haile Selassi’s country is more than a literary flourish. Nawal asks a friend to fill her in on Ethiopian history and the successful revolution against Selassi. “All I know,” she adds, “is that he used to rule with the force of God, like Sadat in our country.”^[74] The comparison has been drawn. We should then not be surprised to learn that Sadat even borrowed the euphemism for prison, “the safe place,” from the Ethiopians.^[75] When Nawal, on hearing Haile Selassi’s story, responds that it resembles the stories of The Thousand and One Nights, she brings more than just the two rulers together: Selassi now joins his Egyptian cohort as a possible mythical leader inhabiting the kingdom of Nawal El Saadawi’s novel The Fall of the Imam. The deep corruption of Selassi’s regime serves as a commentary on Egypt, as Egypt does on Ethiopia.

Africa brings us full circle. It redefines Nawal’s homeland, just as it redefines her. Her last encounter in the book is with the Senegalese writer Sembene Othman, a critic of President Senghor’s notion of “négritude.” “There is not a culture that springs from black skin and another culture that springs from white skin,” Othman says. “Culture springs from the brain, and there is no black brain and white brain.” Nor is he in favor of Senghor’s politics, which he compares to the politics of Sadat. As for Nasser, he is beloved of all Africans. Nawal replies: “That is true.”

He said: Are you a Nasserite?

I said: No.

He said: Are you a Marxist?

I said: No.

I said: I do not like to attribute myself to a person, whoever he may be. I am for justice, equality, and freedom for woman, man, and the nation. ‘Abd al-Nâsir was great, but his mistakes were also great. Marx was a great thinker, but his ideas were also deficient, in particular concerning the position of women.^[76]

These are Nawal’s last words in the book. She has effectively declared her intellectual and political independence both from Middle Eastern political heroes and from Western ones. Her travels to the East and to the West have helped seal not only her cultural but also her political identity.

Notes

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