Nawal El Saadawi's the Fall of the Imam and the Possibility of a Feminine Writing

The writing of Nawal El Saadawi(1) reminds readers that not all "democracies" of what we used to be comfortable calling the "free world" are quite as respectful of civil liberties as we often naively assume them to be. Saadawi was trained first as a physician and later as a psychiatrist--something of a professional feat for an Egyptian woman a generation ago, given the restrictions on women's rights in the Arab world, even in a more "liberal" state such as Egypt. Eventually, she rose to become Egypt's Director of Public Health, but then she was summarily fired, in large part because of her outspokenness as an advocate of women's rights. In addition, she had begun to make increasingly frank assertions about human sexuality, especially in her book Women and Sex (1972), a study of the status of Arab women and their aspirations for freedom. In 1981, she and hundreds of other Egyptian intellectuals were imprisoned by Anwar Sadat, a political hero in the West for his pioneering efforts to achieve peace in the Middle East. Subsequently, Saadawi's works have been banned in Egypt. Saadawi's feminism does not restrict itself to the "content" of a narrative such as The Fall of the Imam;(2) however, it soon becomes clear that the very "form" of her fiction, in its subversion of traditional plot structure, is implicated in a more subtle variety of feminist project. In the preface to The Fall of the Imam, Saadawi explains that the text comes out of her experience in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East during a period of ten years before the novel appeared in 1987. She speaks of her many conversations with victims of Arab culture, such as the Iranian woman whose "little girl" was raped by her jailers, and the Sudanese woman who accompanied Saadawi on a visit to the "Association for People with Amputated Hands," where she saw many of those who had been punished under Muslim law, called "Shariat." Confronting the horrors of what men can do to men, but also what they can do to women and children, Saadawi constructed a fantasy narrative of a girl called Bint Allah, who is stoned to death for fornication, as well as crimes against God and the State--God and the State being virtually synonymous with those in power. The decision to employ fantasy as the means of representing the horrors of a repressive State entailed some risk for Saadawi in her efforts at bearing witness to atrocities against women. Saadawi is working in a context similar to the modus operandi of other fantasists who have dealt with the "unspeakable." Art Spiegelman in Maus (1986) and Jane Yolen in The Devil's Arithmetic (1988) come immediately to mind. As a fantasist, she could easily be misread as offering a form of artistic "play" in response to an oppression of women that makes Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1986) seem mild in contrast(3) Whether contemporary writers are right in attempting to represent the horrors of the Holocaust or not, Elie Wiesel's pronouncements cannot be easily ignored when he warns that any attempt to represent atrocity is to engage in a morally abhorrent activity. The Fall of the Imam is likely to prove problematic for most readers; at the same time, the novel's plot is intrinsic to this narrative's subversive--one might add, "feminist"--impulses. Bint Allah, "Daughter of God," is apparently pursued again and again by agents of the Imam who apparently shoot her or stone her to death for claiming that she is either Allah's daughter or the Imam's. The segment of the narrative that focuses upon the Imam and his relationship with his inner circle seems to move forward in a more traditionally linear fashion, even though it is uncertain whether the Imam is indeed assassinated. More central to the narrative, however, is the recurring pursuit and killing of Bint Allah. Even this brief and truncated rendition of Saadawi's novel should suggest the problematic nature of her narrative structure.(4) The traditional structure of narrative, from which Saadawi is clearly departing, is nowhere more brilliantly explored than in Peter Brooks's contribution to contemporary narratology. …