God Dies by the Nile and Other Novels

by Nawal El Saadawi

  ‘The most wonderful dance I’ve ever seen and the most beautiful dancer that exists!’

  His arms were around her, filling her nostrils with a rusty metallic smell and her mouth with bitter, acrid saliva. She saw his bulbous eyes grow larger and more prominent, a strange frightening look in them. She struggled to turn, in terror, but saw only the desert and darkness. She tried to breathe but couldn’t and with all her strength pushed him away from her, leapt up and ran. He ran after her.

  Before her the spreading darkness, behind her that bulbous-eyed shadow, stalking her. It seemed that the flat desert in front of her was rising and spinning into two great, bulging eyes as she ran in a long narrow trench between them. The black convex bulk of the sky, too, had become great, bulging eyes, towering over and pressing down on her. She stumbled against something round and solid, fell to the ground and lost consciousness.

  Lost consciousness except for that one conscious cell into which her five senses were polarized. She could still see, hear, feel, taste and smell. She felt a plump, fleshy hand on her chest, smelled a rusty metallic smell, tasted bitter, acrid saliva.

  The cushiony hand became coarse, trembling fingers. The trembling did not stay in one place but crept lower, to her stomach and thighs. She saw his thick creased, fleshy neck like the trunk of an old tree out of which jutted small black buds which might have lived and developed but instead had died and decayed. His unbuttoned silk shirt revealed a hairless, fleshy chest, an unfastened leather belt hung around a bloated belly from which hung a pair of thin, hairless legs. His belly rose and fell with his spasmodic breathing and from inside him came a curious, muffled rattle like the groan of a sick animal.

  A strange, heavy coldness enveloped her body, a coldness it had known only once before. She had been lying on a leather sheet surrounded by metal instruments – scalpels and syringes and scissors. The doctor picked up a long syringe and jabbed its needle into her arm. That same heavy coldness had coursed through her body as though she were plunged into a bath of ice and her body grew heavier and slowly drowned.

  Only now there was no water beneath her but something soft … like sand. Cold air entered her dishevelled dress, hot, bitter saliva gathered in her throat, the smell of something old and rusted invaded her nostrils. A panting, shuddering bulk lay beside her, its thin legs limp and shaking. She tried to open her mouth to spit but could not. Her eyelids grew heavy and closed.

  * * *

  She opened her eyes to see daylight streaming through the slats of the shutters. She looked around in bewilderment. Everything in her room was normal, the wardrobe, clothes-stand, window, ceiling and jagged circle. She heard shuffling feet in the living room, approaching her room. She looked at the door expecting her mother’s face to appear, but a long while passed and nothing happened. Remembering, she leaped out of bed onto her feet. Trembling, she went to the living room and apprehensively approached the door of her mother’s room. Was it all a dream? Or was she really dead? She put her head round the door, saw the empty bed and retreated in fear. She went to the kitchen, to the dining room, to the bathroom but her mother was nowhere. Dizzily she leaned her head against the wall. A solid lump whirled in her skull, knocking against the bones. Bitterness scalded her throat. Supporting herself against the wall, she staggered to the sink and opened her mouth to spit, but the bitterness pressed on her stomach and she vomited. The obscene, rusty smell emanated from her mouth, her nose, her clothes. She undressed, stood beneath the shower and scrubbed her body with a loofa and soap but the smell clung to her flesh. It had entered her pores and cells and into her blood.

  Still clutching the walls, she returned to her room. Looking around in distraction, her eyes settled on the face of her mother in the photograph hanging near the wardrobe. Her mother seemed to look out at her with large, jaundiced eyes, feebly pleading with her to stay. She covered the face with her hand. Would her mother never lose that accusing look? Had she not paid for her sin? Wasn’t she filled with that burning bitter taste? Wasn’t her body steeped in that concentrated smell of old rust? Was there any grief greater than this? What was grief? How did people grieve? A loud scream clearing the voice and relieving pent-up feelings? Black clothing whose newness refreshed the body? Banquets and slaughtered meat stimulating the appetite and filling the stomach? Was there a dead mother who enjoyed more grief than this? Was there another mother whose daughter swallowed poison after her? Was there a mother’s death greater than this death? Was there a greater filial repayment?

  She went to bed feeling somewhat calmer and stretched out her arms and legs, but the heaviness was still on her body, the bitterness still burned. When, when would this heaviness relent and this burden lift?

  The telephone rang. It was him. None other. There was only him left. There was nothing else left but to swallow poison day after day. Her insides would be eroded by the acrid burning, her body saturated by the concentration of old, cold rust. Only a slow death remained.

  She put out a slender hand and raised the receiver. The hoarse, oily voice came through:

  ‘Good morning, Fouada. How are you?’

  ‘Alive,’ she said listlessly.

  ‘What are you doing tonight?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I have nothing left.’

  ‘What about me? I am left,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘there’s only you left.’

  ‘I’ll pick you up at the laboratory at half past eight,’ he said.

  * * *

  Walking out of the door she noticed something, something white and glistening behind the glass panel. She stepped back and peered into the mailbox. There was a letter there. Her body began to shake. She opened the box and picked up the letter with long, trembling fingers. She glanced at the large, square letters with their familiar flourishes. Her heart throbbed painfully. It was Farid’s writing … Dream or reality? She saw the stairs, the door and the mailbox. She put out a trembling hand to touch it. Yes, it was there, it was tangible. She fingered the letter. It was real paper with a thickness and density of its own. She put her fingers to her eyelids. They were open.

  She turned the letter over, examining the corners and edges. There was nothing on it other than her name and address. She put it to her nose and met that distinctive smell of paper and postage stamp. She opened the envelope and took out a long sheet of paper, covered with writing:

  Fouada…

  How many days have passed since our last meeting, since that short night that bore the first winds of winter. You were sitting before me, the Nile behind you, in your eyes that strange glint which said: ‘I have something new’ and your slender fingers drumming on the table with a quiet that hid the volcano beneath. You were silent and I knew you were in pain. After a long silence you said: ‘What do you think, Farid? Shall I leave the Ministry?’ I understood you. At that moment, you wanted me to say: ‘Yes, leave it, come with me.’ But, you remember, I said nothing. I always felt that your role was different to mine. Your role is to create something new if you’re given the chance, whereas my role is to create the chance for people to create something new. And what is new? Changing the old? And what does change create? Isn’t it thought? Do you remember that small child who did the rounds of the tables in the restaurants? Do you remember his wrinkled hand when he held it out for a piece of bread or a piastre? People pitied him and gave him a piastre without thinking. If only they thought about what a piastre does! If only they thought why he was hungry! Yes, Fouada, it’s thought, the idea that emerges from the head. Does an idea emerge from the head without expression?

  Your role is to create the idea and mine to create the expression. Alone, I can do nothing. My role is neither as easy nor as convincing as the words appear to be. It’s a sort of madness, for how do stifled, muted mouths express themselves? How can a voice penetrate through dense, stone walls? It’s a sort of madness, but the madness of one individual can create nothing, only collective madness… do you remember that old c
onversation?

  All right, I am not alone. There are others with me. All we have is that simple, dangerous role, and those simple, natural words which were born with the first human … to think and to express. Nothing except these words for us to say and write. No cannons or rifles or bombs. Only words.

  After we separated that short night, I walked alone down Nile Street, thinking about you, feeling you were in pain, that deep inside you a new idea was struggling to come out, fighting alone against a high wall … in the Ministry, at home, in the street and in your skull. Yes, Fouada, there’s another wall in your head, one you were not born with, but which day by day was erected out of long silence. I said to myself that night as I walked: ‘It is only a short wall, it will collapse finally, when the other walls collapse.’

  I did not reach home. A man stood in my way. I think he was not alone, there were others, perhaps many, all armed. I had nothing. You remember, I was wearing a brown shirt and trousers. They searched my pockets and found nothing. Are words put in a pocket? They grabbed me and put me in irons, but the words were carried in the wind. Can they catch the wind and put it in irons?

  The walls surround me, but you are with me. I feel your small, soft hand on my face and see your green eyes looking into mine, that imprisoned, new thing appearing in them that wants to be born but cannot. Do not grieve, Fouada, and do not weep. The words are in the wind beyond the walls, alive and entering hearts with the very air. A day will surely come when the walls will fall and voices will once again be freed to speak.

  Farid

  THE

  CIRCLING

  SONG

  NAWAL EL SAADAWI

  FOREWORD BY FEDWA MALTI-DOUGLAS

  FOREWORD

  Prolific writer, ardent fighter for women’s rights, challenger of patriarchy, feared by most and loved by many, without doubt the most prominent and prolific female author in Arabic: Nawal El Saadawi, trained as a doctor and psychiatrist, has the uncanny ability to place her finger on the hot buttons that inflame Arab readers.

  Anyone who puts pen to paper has a favourite book among all the books to his or her name. It is no surprise that, for the prolific Egyptian physician–author Nawal El Saadawi, hers should be The Circling Song.

  The Circling Song is a translation of the Arabic novel Ughniyyat al-Atfal al-Da’iriyya, rendered more correctly into English as The Children’s Circling Song. The presence of the children is not accidental, since this haunting and masterful narrative revolves around a song sung by children holding each other’s hands to form a circle without a beginning or an end. The children run in this never-ending circle as they sing a song that is itself repeated endlessly. The intrusive narrator provides the reader with a lesson on the Arabic language, in which meanings and genders can be changed with one dot or one letter. The twins, Hamida (the female) and Hamido (the male), are the central protagonists who display beautifully this ambiguity in the Arabic language.

  Hamida steals a piece of candy, which she sucks as she lies in bed. The store-owner chases her and rapes her. This violation sets the narrative into motion as first the mother suspects that the blood she sees on her young daughter’s clothing signals menstruation. But when Hamida’s belly grows in size, the mother understands that the blood represents something else. She sends her daughter away on a train. This first rape, caused by a stolen piece of candy, is followed by a second rape, this one in the city where Hamida arrives by train. Impelled by hunger she grabs some bread, and this stolen food leads to her second rape, this time by ‘the government’. When Hamida is raped a third time, she is a servant assaulted by her master because she has eaten a small piece of meat.

  The confluence of eating and rape brings us into the universe of the corporal as it intersects with the political (the second rape) and the social (the third rape). The coming together of these three elements is not unusual in Saadawi’s fiction.

  We see the identical confluence, but with a clear religious component added, in Woman at Point Zero, where the doctor narrator is entranced by an imprisoned prostitute’s narrative. The prostitute, Firdaus, we learn, was also raped, by her uncle, a traditionally educated man. She is then married to a much older religious man. A miser, he beats his wife because he has found a piece of food in the garbage. She runs away to an uncle’s house where she is informed that men, especially religious ones, beat their wives. She escapes, but this time into prostitution.

  As The Circling Song’s Hamida exits the train in the city, her brother, Hamido, is boarding a train at the instigation of his father, who declares to him that ‘only blood washes out shame’ – the blood being, of course, female.

  In another Saadawian tale, a short story entitled ‘A Story from a Woman Doctor’s Life’, a third-person narrator introduces the text: ‘Dr S. wrote in her diary.’ Dr S. in this unusual framing proceeds to recount the story. A young girl is sitting in her clinic, flanked by a tall young man, her brother. The brother entreats the doctor to examine his sister, wishing to reassure himself about her, ‘since we are marrying her off to her cousin next week’. The girl cuts her brother off, insisting that she does not love this man and does not wish to marry him. The brother, however, responds that she does not want to marry him for ‘another reason, Doctor… I think you understand’, a clear allusion to the possibility of her having lost her virginity.

  Observing the fright in the young girl’s eyes, the doctor asks the brother to leave the room in order that she undertake the examination. Alone with the doctor, the young girl begs her to save her from this brother, who would kill her. The doctor decides that she cannot examine the patient without her permission. She tells the young woman that she will inform her brother that this is outside her purview. The patient objects, insisting that her brother will simply take her to another doctor. She then asks the doctor to claim that she examined her and that she was ‘honourable’. Her brother, she adds, will kill her otherwise. She is in love with another man and will marry him in a month, swearing to the doctor that nothing dishonourable occurred between them.

  Examining her conscience and her medical codes, the doctor in the story calls in the brother and declares to him that his sister is honourable. As she explains it later, she believes that the girl is indeed honourable. ‘Medicine can only distinguish between disease and non-disease. It cannot distinguish between honour and dishonour.’ The brother is made to apologize to his sister for doubting her and the two leave. The doctor then writes her own oath: ‘I swear that my humanity and my conscience will be my rules in my work and my art’, adding ‘I put down my pen and felt an ease I had not felt for a long time.’

  The framing technique here is more an introductory preface to the doctor’s written words. If it were absent, however, it would not alter the essential plot of the story. Hence, its presence is quite eloquent. This doctor needs a third-person narrator as an intermediary who introduces the actual writing process itself. The recording of the story in writing differs from oral and epistolary framings, although like them it requires mediation. Like the other protagonists whose sagas needed to be narrated by the doctor, Hamida and Hamido, from the countryside, are individuals who would not have access to the written word. The woman doctor is once more the means through which silent voices can tell their stories.

  With the brother–sister combo, El Saadawi has put her medical finger on a deep societal problem. Brother–sister jealousy is pervasive in Arabo-Islamic culture. So pervasive, in fact, that the noted Arab folklorist Hasan El-Shamy has boldly argued that brother–sister sexual attraction and subsequent jealousy are so powerful in Arab culture that they replace in its psychological centrality the Oedipus conflict in Western society. This brother– sister relationship appears in texts ranging from the medieval to the modern, from the literary to the philosophical.

  The sister in this Saadawian short story is frightened by her brother. Twice she repeats to the doctor that her brother will kill her. This is not an unrealistic expectation on the part of the young g
irl, as her Saadawian literary cousin, Hamida, demonstrates. The girl’s honour is the motivating force behind the visit to the doctor. The female body must be certified as honourable before it can be handed on to the would-be husband. But this male knows little about women’s solidarity. He is attempting to control a woman’s body, which becomes a pawn in intricate social gender games. The doctor, however, is able to defeat this man’s desire and give the young woman back her body. Medicine as social power for the female comes to the rescue.

  In the Saadawian short story, the brother’s concern for his sister’s virginity is pre-eminent. Her body is a commodity whose honour, if absent, will surely lead to her death. The Syrian male writer Zakariyya Tamir savagely attacks the marital customs that turn the female into a commodity in his short story ‘The Eastern Wedding’. There, the price of the young girl is agreed on, so much per kilo, and she is taken to the marketplace and weighed in. Tamir comes close to Saadawi, who even in Memoirs of a Woman Doctor likened the vocabulary used in the marriage ceremony to that used in the rental of an apartment, store, or other property. The marriage-as-commerce metaphor is repeated when the narrator of Memoirs wonders if people expect her to sit and wait while some man decides to come and buy her as one buys a cow. Woman’s body is a commercial object whose value is linked to its ‘honour’.

  Dr S’s new oath with which she closes her case history calls for humanity and conscience not only in her work but in her art as well. Medicine and art are once again brought together in an eloquent proclamation. But it is through medicine that she has saved a sister from the death threats of her brother. Social justice becomes fused with the physician’s art, understood in the broadest sense.

  The story of Dr S., like Memoirs of a Woman Doctor, shows us the potential power of an upper-class woman in Egyptian society. She may be able to save herself. She may sometimes be able to save others. But what we glimpse in these medical narratives, and what is more clearly revealed in other Saadawian narratives, is another female type: the lower-class woman who loses control over her body and who, if she attempts to regain it, will meet with physical destruction. This is certainly the case for Hamida in The Circling Song.