‘From the Street to the World of Art’: Writing Women's Liberation in Nawal El Saadawi's Zeina

Summary

Renowned Egyptian writer and feminist Nawal El Saadawi's phenomenal novel Zeina is strategically set against the backdrop of revolution in Cairo. Revolutionary in its own rights, the novel chronicles female resistance to patriarchal mandates. The poignant and searing critique of the masculinist Egyptian regime should come as no surprise. Mona Eltahawy reminds us that, according to a 2013 Thomson Reuters Foundation poll of women's rights following the Arab Spring, Egypt ‘was judged to be the single worst country for women's rights, scoring badly in almost every category, including gender violence, reproductive rights, treatment of women in the family and female inclusion in politics and the economy’ (Eltahawy Headscarves and Hymens: 24). Shedding light on the precarious position in which feminists in the region find themselves, Khadidiatou Guéye is quick to point out that in the Arab region most women writers’ ‘feminist ideologies clash with the Muslim background of their cultures’ (‘Tyrannical Femininity’: 160). While religion is undoubtedly one of the tools of female oppression, Eltahawy surmises: ‘Whether our politics are tinged with religion or with military rule, the common denominator is the oppression of women’ (18). A consummate feminist and the leading spokeswoman on the status of women in the Arab region, El Saadawi exposes, even as she challenges, the male-centric, patriarchal regime that perpetuates female oppression.

The illegitimate daughter of Bodour, a young university studentturned- literary-critic and distinguished professor, and Nessim, a young revolutionary, Zeina, the eponymous heroine, is abandoned by her mother on the streets of Cairo when Nessim is killed during one of many demonstrations of the repressive patriarchal system. Forced to carry this secret, Bodour writes a fictionalised account of her life, which mysteriously gets stolen. In a novel where female bodies are subject to the worst form of subjugation, colonisation, and body theft, the novel's title, The Stolen Novel, is apt. The theft of Bodour's text/body appears to be an act of revenge for the idea of the book germinated ‘specifically on a night that passed like a terrifying nightmare or an ephemeral dream of paradise when she had eaten the forbidden fruit’ (32).