The Dramatic Literature of Nawal El Saadawi E-Book

Nawal El Saadawi

• Herausgeber: Saqi Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Nawal El Saadawi's most recent play, God Resigns at the Summit Meeting, created an uproar in her native Egypt. On the basis of the title alone, officials declared the work heretical and charged El Saadawi with insulting the "Almighty God", not just Islam. Her prosecutors requested that all her books be destroyed, that she be arrested on return to Egypt and her Egyptian nationality be revoked. In the play, the prophets and great women gather for a meeting with God. Satan arrives to tender his resignation but neither Jesus, nor Mohammad, nor Moses are willing to replace him. Finally, God himself resigns. The second play in this collection is Isis, a critique of the discriminatory rules that control women, the daughters of Isis. Both God Resigns and Isis incorporate key themes to El Saadawi's work: that all religions are inimical to women and the poor, that the oppression of women is reprehensible and not uniquely characteristic of the Middle East or the ''Third World'', and that free speech is fundamental to any society. "El Saadawi writes with directness and passion" New York Times Book Review 'A poignant and brave writer' Marie Claire 'The leading spokeswoman on the status of women in the Arab World' Guardian 'More than any other woman, El Saadawi has come to embody the trials of Arab feminism.' San Francisco Chronicle

Leseprobe

Nawal El Saadawi

The Dramatic Literature of Nawal El Saadawi

Edited by

Adele S. Newson-Horst

Isis

Translated from the Arabic by

Rihab Kassatly Bagnole

God Resigns at the Summit Meeting

Translated from the Arabic by

Sherif Hetata

SAQI

eISBN: 978-0-86356-812-1

First published by Saqi, 2009

This eBook edition published 2012

Copyright © Nawal El Saadawi, 2009

Foreword © Adele S. Newson-Horst, 2009

Translation and introduction to Isis © Rihab Kassatly Bagnole, 2009

Translation of God Resigns at the Summit Meeting © Sherif Hetata, 2009

Introduction to God Resigns at the Summit Meeting © Jane Plastow, 2009

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Foreword, by Adele S. Newson-Horst

I. Isis

Introduction, by Rihab Kassatly Bagnole

Isis (play)

Author’s Note

II. God Resigns at the Summit Meeting

Introduction, by Jane Plastow

God Resigns at the Summit Meeting (play)

Author’s Note

Contributors

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the author, Nawal El Saadawi, for the courageous efforts she advanced in writing the two plays contained in this volume. Saadawi writes what she believes and makes no excuses for her beliefs. Yet, refreshingly, her beliefs are open to debate.

I would also like to thank André Gaspard, the publisher of Saqi Books, for his enthusiasm for this project. Gaspard has a distinguished history of support for the voices of creative writers. Saqi has published and continues to publish many of El Saadawi’s works, including Two Women in One, Love in the Kingdom of Oil, and The Fall of the Imam, among others. In a recent conversation on the rise of fundamentalism around the world, Gaspard observed, the “courageous artist consistently risks his/her own personal well-being.” To which El Saadawi answered, “Democracy is a tool. Not a key. You have to prepare and make sacrifices to enjoy its fruits.”

To Rihab Kassatly Bagnole (Ohio University) for her introduction to Isis, translations and summaries; to Jane Plastow (Leeds University) for her introduction to God Resigns at the Summit Meeting; and to Sherif Hetata for his translation of God Resigns at the Summit Meeting, I also offer heartfelt thanks for their efforts and dedication to this project.

Finally, I wish to thank Christopher J. Herr (Missouri State University) for his honest criticism and enthusiasm as well as my graduate assistant Jessica Glover for her care and attention to detail.

Adele S. Newson-Horst June 2008

FOREWORD

In the Light of a Liberating Female Gaze: The Dramatic Literature of Nawal El Saadawi

Nawal El Saadawi has to her credit seven dramatic works published in Arabic by Madbouli Publishers. Part of a larger series of works, these plays are: Isis, God Resigns at the Summit Meeting, Children Singing for Love, Twelve Women in a Cell, The Torn Picture, The Ruler in the Name of God, and The Blue Female. In his introduction to the series, the publisher wrote, “In the past fifty years Dr. Nawal El Saadawi has given to her Arabic readers and Arabic thought a complete project characterized by courage in speaking her mind—discussing many issues that most of the writers are afraid to address ... Her works changed the mentality of our region.” Twelve Women in a Cell was also published in English (in the volume Plays by Mediterranean Women) in 1994. In the introduction to that volume, Marion Baraitser explained, “These plays allow us to reverse the position [of women] and lift the veil on ancient civilizations—Jewish, Muslim and Christian—and view them in the light of a liberating female gaze”.1 These words resonate with El Saadawi’s efforts in this present volume.

Reminiscent of the early years during which El Saadawi discovers her passion for and the possibilities inherent in drama, this collection contains two plays that center on the question of the dissolution of feminine power. They can therefore be seen as works of recovery. The first dramatic work, Isis, was written in Cairo in 1986 after El Saadawi saw a play by Tawfiq al-Hakim with the same title. Rihab Kassatly Bagnole recently translated it into English. The second play, God Resigns at the Summit Meeting, was written in Durham, North Carolina in 1996 while she was a visiting professor at Duke University. It was translated and edited by Sherif Hetata. Isis was adapted to the theater in French and performed in Brussels in November 2007.

Many of the themes in her works of fiction and non-fiction culminate in these two dramatic works. El Saadawi’s polemics center on a debate about justice. In her polemic justice does not exist without equality—equality for the poor, women, and the lower economic classes. Additionally, when there is unity among these factions, as advocated in her play Isis, the rule of the unjust or the privileged class can be defeated.

The goddess Isis appears to be El Saadawi’s “personal muse” suggesting the strength of and possibilities for women. In her autobiography A Daughter of Isis (1999), her mother is likened to the goddess. El Saadawi writes that her mother made her childhood happy, yet, there were times when she felt disappointment and:

Then something would come along and wipe it all away, delete it from my memory, banish it from history. My mother would be at her best, once more a shining star, the real mother that I knew, her head held high, a woman full of pride, a goddess like Isis, a halo of light around her head, like a full moon, a silvery crown that the ancient Egyptian goddess wore above her brow. When I watched her move it taught me to be proud, to dream of better things, of a place for myself in this vast world.2

El Saadawi appropriates Isis’s legendary place in Egyptian consciousness to enable her successes and well-being. Also in El Saadawi’s poetics Isis is associated with the arts—music, song, and dance. At the age of nine, rather than imagining herself as a doctor, El Saadawi dreamt of sitting at a piano playing music, singing, and/or dancing, “my feet beating on the ground, my head crowned with the disc of the sun, lifting it up like the goddess Isis”.3 While attending the English language school, she was “singled ... out from all the girls to play the role of Isis on the stage”.4 Her performance was such a success that after that, whenever people saw her on the streets they would point her out and say, “There is Isis”.5

In December 2006, Madbouli Publishers in Cairo re-issued many of her books and published for the first time God Resigns at the Summit Meeting in Arabic. It caused quite a stir in the Islamic world. Without reading the work, officials declared that God cannot resign and that her work constituted heresy. The police went to the publisher and ordered him to destroy all the copies of the play and he obeyed to thwart persecution. Subsequently, El Azhar leveled heresy and apostasy charges against her because of the play God Resigns at the Summit Meeting.

Having survived several repressive regimes, El Saadawi firmly situates herself as a writer for social justice. She insists that it is her job, as a writer, to expose the truth about colonial rule, political patrimony, and religious fundamentalism. “If I don’t tell the truth,” she advises with great conviction, “I don’t deserve to be called a writer”.6 And writing for El Saadawi is essential because it assures that important issues, issues regarding the inequity of power and humanity, do not disappear in the shroud of propaganda that characterizes much of the world’s affairs—both religious and secular.7

Isis, the feminine archetype for creation, is a perennial favorite for El Saadawi. Her autobiography A Daughter of Isis is aptly named in that Isis is the enabler of El Saadawi’s resistance to domination. Similarly, in her work Love in the Kingdom of Oil (1993 in Arabic), a female archaeologist “goes missing with chisel” in search of proof of the existence of female goddesses. For without such proof, there can be no equality among the sexes. The high degree of male domination in the Kingdom is suggested by the fact that the protagonist has to have a written document approving her leave from either a boss or a husband. In her introduction to the play Isis El Saadawi explains:

Many writers have written about Isis, the ancient Egyptian goddess, but no one credits her as a teacher and inventor of agriculture, bread making, and writing, nor do they portray her accurately as a figure who had a philosophy, values, and religion. Her cult had spread her teachings in Egypt and in Europe and survived all kinds of opposition until the sixth century.

Many writers have ignored this truth about Isis and considered her merely the wife of Osiris. They have formed a mundane image of her based on her loyalty to her husband and her role as a mother. An example of such a portrayal is her role in the play Isis, written by Tawfiq al-Hakim, in which he limits the character of Isis to that of a woman who lost her husband and is determined to bring him back. Al-Hakim compares Isis to Sheherezade and Penelope, who also supported their husbands. He transforms Isis into a silent figure unable to participate in the debates among philosophers and writers and ready to forfeit her values for the sake of her husband.

Presented in two acts, Isis is the precursor to God Resigns at the Summit Meeting. The spirit of debate (that would lead to a functional democracy) is introduced in the play Isis, and it is embodied in the title character. Then in God Resigns, debate is central to the resolution of the myriad problems, appropriated masterfully by the female characters and culminating in a work of literature. Isis answers the question of how women became powerless and God Resigns answers the question of how, centuries later, women might regain their foothold while acknowledging the consequences of dissident acts.

Isis begins with the overthrow of the female goddess Nut and the establishment of a new world order, an “era of supreme men, the era of masculinity, the era of strong male rulers. Gone is the period of women and weak men.” Ra proclaims himself the ruler of the sky and Seth, Isis’s brother, the ruler of earth. To gain this seat on earth, Seth must murder Osiris, Isis’s husband and his older brother. Ra’s doctrine has three principles: First, he is the one and only god; there can be no others. Second, doubters of his supremacy will be eliminated. And, third, only a son may inherit the throne after him; there will be no sharing of inheritance with daughters.

After totally dissolving female power, in a scene that echoes King Shahryar’s response to his beloved wife’s betrayal, Ra discovers his wife’s infidelity with an Ethiopian slave, and with the help of his high priest, stumbles upon the idea of female excision and the castration of slaves who are privy to Ra’s harem. In this scene, El Saadawi brilliantly demonstrates female circumcision’s lack of connection with religion (especially Islam); the idea for female genital mutilation was motivated by control of women—the suppression of their sexual desires. El Saadawi, then, exposes the prevalent cultural patrimony and religious fundamentalism engenders the practices.

Yet, in spite of the destruction of temples to other gods and goddesses (especially the temples of Isis) and the proclamation to destroy their images as well as their place in history, people persisted in their belief in Isis as a symbol of mercy, intelligence, and justice. She resurrects her dead husband Osiris in the form of a sailor and bears a son, Horus. They live in a poor village where all work (peasants, gods, and goddesses alike), and priests are not deemed sacred or worthy of sacrifices. When Seth discovers them, Isis rallies the people and convenes a people’s court to judge Seth’s crimes. Seth maintains that the fundamental issue is Isis’s adultery, while Isis maintains that the issue is Seth’s brutality and lack of honor. Honor she equates with justice.

In the one-act play, God Resigns at the Summit Meeting, the prophets and the great women go to the mountain, where God is believed to reside, to request His help. Moses’ people have turned from God to pursue wealth. Jesus is plagued by the queries of demanding feminists. Muhammad has to contend with corrupt Arab governments. And, Satan wishes to tender his resignation.

God grants an audience with the prophets, the great women, Satan, and various other characters and emissaries—including Bill Clinton and then Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu. The meeting is characterized by dozens of opposing viewpoints and the exhortations of injustice by Bint Allah, daughter of God, who is also, ironically, a writer. In El Saadawi’s cosmology, writers are often in collusion with the status quo. This stifles their creativity and renders them artistically impotent. Unlike the so-called great writer in her work The Fall of the Imam, Bint Allah does not suffer this malaise.

God suggests a closed meeting with His prophets and emissaries—all men. The great women object, but the closed meeting is held in spite of the objection. The goal of the closed meeting (even though God’s entrance is followed by, among others, representatives of the press and television) is to permit “an exchange between Him and His benevolent emissaries concerning problems affecting the universe.”

First, they attempt to find a replacement for Satan among their lot. Second, they attempt to elect a new prophet to set the world right. They are unable to affect either of the goals and send for the great women of history to help. In the end, God resigns and Bint Allah is arrested for a play that she writes.

Why do these two works take the form of dramatic literature to recover the power of women in history? The basic driving force in both plays is the clash of ideas as they address women. Thursday nights at the boarding school, Helwan Secondary School for Girls, El Saadawi entertained her classmates by writing and acting out plays. Adam Bede was among the English language novels assigned to her. The story of a woman becoming pregnant with an illegitimate baby reminded her “of the servant-girl Shalabeya, who had worked in my late grandfather’s house, and this suggested itself to me as a play which I then wrote under the title A Scream in the Night”.8 When the headmistress discovered evidence of the play, El Saadawi was nearly expelled and the discovery marked the end of the so-called Freedom Theatre she had run.9 Like A Scream in the Night, El Saadawi believes that the tragedies of life lend themselves best to dramatic performance. Perhaps this lesson was learned as a result of her lead in the play Isis as a young girl of nine. The effects of her performance remained with her audience long afterwards. The title of the little theatre suggests that the performance of tragedies lead to freedom.

Additionally, the fruits of debate are found in drama. Isis, Seth tells Ra, is a great debater who was encouraged by their mother Nut. In God Resigns Jesus is plagued by the questions of feminists. In a totalitarian regime there can be no debate. Yet it is the spirit of true debate that creates the dramatic tension in the two works, and it is also the spirit of debate that El Saadawi believes will result in true democracy, characteristic of wide participation. In literature, she explains, the brain was created when the character walked out of the chorus and started to speak alone. In other words, like Eve who chose knowledge, debate is essential to an enlightened existence.

Additionally, female characterization in both works is complex and thoroughly drawn around creative evocations of their imagined lives. El Saadawi’s Isis is alternately fierce, vain, confident, strong, and merciful. In act one, scene three, she appears as maliciously unrelenting and brutal as Seth. This strongly contrasts with the image of Isis the loving wife in Tawfiq al-Hakim’s Isis. Finally, in both works, the world order is suspiciously similar to El Saadawi’s description of the modern world: “we are dominated or governed by one global system which is now called the New World Order”.10 She goes on to warn that:

If capitalist relations continue to govern the major part of our world, must it be the most aggressive and reactionary forces that hold the upper hand, those built on war, on military production, on the arms race, on racial, ethnic, sexual and religious discrimination, on destruction of the natural environment, pollution and imbalance of the ecosystem, on master-slave relations between countries and peoples of the South [the so-called developing world] and countries and peoples of the North [the so-called first world]?11

In God Resigns, Bint Allah (the daughter of God), whom many readers will liken to the author herself, is unrelenting in her pursuit of justice—holding the three Holy Books, God, and the Prophets up to a standard of religious justice El Saadawi learned from her paternal grandmother. Bint Allah is entirely a creation of El Saadawi. She first appears in the novel The Fall of the Imam and is the illegitimate daughter of the Imam. In this work, Bint Allah conspires with the Legal Wife of the Imam (a westerner) and her mother Gawaher (the prostitute) to effect the fall of the representative of God on earth using reason and a refusal to allow male possession of their minds. The character Bint Allah in the play God Resigns at the Summit Meeting is described as “a girl eighteen years old who resembles Eve and looks as though she could be her daughter. But her hair is cut short and on her feet she wears a pair of dancing shoes. She steps lightly over the ground and sometimes dances. Her dress is short above her knees.” She is as fierce and audacious as El Saadawi herself. As Jane Plastow points out in her introduction to God Resigns, “The idea of Allah having a daughter is both transgressive and teasing—a beautiful counterpart to Christ as the son of God.” And, the character is an imaginative representation of which Satan approves. Which stands to reason, since in El Saadawi’s poetics, Satan is the original seeker of knowledge reserved only for God. El Saadawi describes the Devil as “the first rebel in history, the only angel who questioned what the other angels feared to question and the only one that tried to see things from a different perspective”.12 And at the heart of God Resigns is the question of perspective.

Additionally, Eve’s attempt to re-insert herself in the Holy Books, to redefine her seminal act as “the first to lead the human race to knowledge and not death,” and her subsequent questioning of God’s will and intent offer resoundingly compelling arguments.

Common to both works is a call for democracy—the participation of those who have been disenfranchised. Isis mobilizes the peasants and slaves while Bint Allah calls for broad participation in the summit. The exposure to broad participation is rendered in the play Bint Allah writes and for which she is imprisoned. Literature, then, becomes a tool for social justice.

Rihab Kassatly Bagnole and Jane Plastow offer added insight into the two dramatic works with introductions to Isis and God Resigns, respectively. Bagnole is a young Middle Eastern academic who finds in El Saadawi’s Isis more than a correction of history: “She attempted to reassess what had been set out before her. Of course, it is expected of Nawal El Saadawi that she would reform inconsistencies and introduce truths because she is a woman who dares.” Plastow, both an academic and theater practitioner, dubs God Resigns at the Summit Meeting “an epic platonic debate of play where Nawal El Saadawi finally brings all her thinking about monotheistic religion as an oppressive construct together.” Their observations continue and elaborate on the debate.

Adele S. Newson-Horst

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Notes

1. Marion Baraitser, ed., Plays by Mediterranean Women, p. 4.

2. El Saadawi, A Daughter of Isis: The Autobiography of Nawal El Saadawi, London: Zed Books, 1999, p. 4.

3. Ibid., p. 100.

4. Ibid., p. 101.

5. Ibid., p. 101.

6. Adele Newson-Horst, ‘Conversations with Nawal El Saadawi’, in World Literature Today, 82:1, January–February 2008, p. 55.

7. Ibid., p. 55.

8.A Daughter of Isis, p. 219.

9. Ibid., p. 221.

10.The Nawal El Saadawi Reader, London: Zed Books, 1997, p. 12.

11. Ibid., p. 30.

12. ‘The Seventh International AWSA Conference: Rationale and the Way Forward’, Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, 6:2, November 2, 2006, p. 24.

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Works Cited

Baraitser, Marion (editor), Plays by Mediterranean Women, London: Aurora Metro Publications, 1994.

Newson-Horst, Adele, “Conversations with Nawal El Saadawi”, World Literature Today, 82:1, January–February 2008, pp. 55–58.

El Saadawi, Nawal, A Daughter of Isis: The Autobiography of Nawal El Saadawi, London: Zed Books, 1999.

—The Fall of the Imam, London: Saqi, 2002.

—The Nawal El Saadawi Reader, London: Zed Books, 1997.

—The Seventh International AWSA Conference: Rationale and the Way Forward, Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, 6:2, November 2, 2006, pp. 22–32.

—The Introduction to Isis, translated by Rihab Bagnole.

ISIS

A Play in Two Acts

Introduction

In her introduction to Isis (1986), Nawal El Saadawi explains, “This play, which I am presenting now, is the Egyptian Isis as I understand her from history. History belongs to everyone who possesses an amount of imagination, brains, and a genuine curiosity to know the truth.” This declaration sparked my curiosity (as an Arab woman and an American educator) to investigate how a writer from the same region as mine might reinterpret history. What I discovered after reading Isis was, no, El Saadawi did not correct history; she attempted to reassess what had been set out before her. Of course, it is expected of Nawal El Saadawi that she would reform inconsistencies and introduce truths because she is a woman who dares.

I met Nawal El Saadawi at The Spring Literary Festival at Ohio University in 2007, but I knew about her from her writings three decades earlier, while I was still a student at the University of Damascus in Syria in the 1970s. Who back then could resist reading Memoir of a Woman Doctor (1958), Women and Sex (1972), and The Naked Face of Arab Women (1974), the marvelous early books of Nawal El Saadawi? Her topics appealed to my generation because they discussed taboo subjects that we were eager to explore, and they taught us the secrets of femininity and the importance of self-appreciation. We could not put down a book by Nawal El Saadawi once we started reading it and my group of friends and I used to hide Women and Sex inside a textbook to read without interruption.