El Saadawi, Nawal 1931–

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Nawal El Saadawi 1931-

(Also rendered as Nawâl al-Sa'dâwi or Nawal al-Saadawi) Egyptian novelist, short story writer, memoirist, autobiographer, and essayist.

INTRODUCTION

El Saadawi is considered one of the preeminent figures in Middle Eastern feminist literature and activism. In her writings she critiques the subservient role women are expected to play in many traditional patriarchal societies and details the physical torture and emotional humiliation that contribute to their oppression. One of El Saadawi's major themes is the universal danger of fundamentalist religions, which, she argues, are based on the premise that women are to blame for all human ills. In her writings and her activism El Saadawi advocates the separation of religion and government in Arab culture, calling for an end to the practice of female genital mutilation, and the recognition of women's full human rights.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

El Saadawi was born in 1931 in Kafr Tahla, Egypt. Although her Muslim family was considered progressive, encouraging El Saadawi and her sisters to pursue advanced degrees, they adhered to the traditional practice of performing clitoridectomies (also called female genital mutilation, or FGM) on their daughters. El Saadawi was forced to undergo this painful procedure when she was six years old—a traumatic event she recounted in her book El wajh el ary lilma'ra el arabeya (1977; The Hidden Face of Eve). After completing secondary school, El Saadawi enrolled at the University of Cairo, where she was one of only a handful of female students seeking a degree as a medical doctor. She received her degree in psychiatry in 1955. That year she married a fellow physician, Ahmed Helmy, and had a daughter; the marriage ended in divorce in 1956. Shortly afterward, El Saadawi was pressured into marrying Rashad Bey, who opposed El Saadawi's budding feminism as well as her pursuit of a writing career. El Saadawi and Bey also divorced. El Saadawi moved to New York to attend Columbia University, receiving her master's degree in public health in 1966. She married again, to Dr. Sherif Hetata, and the couple returned to Egypt, where El Saadawi accepted a post with the Ministry of Health in Cairo. She was eventually named the agency's director of health education—a rare post for a woman. At the same time, she served as assistant general secretary of the country's medical association and as editor-in-chief of a health magazine. During this time she performed important research on women's psychology, much of it based on her work with the inmates at Qanatir Women's Prison. But after the publication of her nonfiction book El ma'ra wal ginse (1971; Women and Sex), which was strongly critical of the Islamic approach to women's sexuality and of female genital mutilation, she was fired from her positions, her writings were censored, and her life was frequently threatened by religious fundamentalists.

In 1979 she took a position in Ethiopia as director of the United Nations' African Training and Research Center for Women, but she returned to Egypt in 1980 in order to focus on writing. In 1981 Egypt's President Anwar Sadat rounded up political dissidents, both male and female, and imprisoned them. El Saadawi was held at Qanatir Women's Prison for two months. She wrote about the experience in Mozakerati fi signel nissa (1983; Memoirs from the Women's Prison). After her release from prison, El Saadawi founded the feminist group Arab Women's Solidarity Association, which was shut down by the Egyptian government in 1991. Because of continued death threats against her, El Saadawi and her husband left Egypt in 1993, and she accepted a position at Duke University in North Carolina. She subsequently taught at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Georgetown, Florida State, the University of California-Berkeley, and the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1996 the couple returned once more to Egypt. In 2001 a fundamentalist Islamic group sued to annul El Saadawi's marriage to Hetata under Islam's Sharia law on the grounds that her heresy was causing harm to her husband's soul—the case was dismissed, and the couple remains married. In 2004 El Saadawi's novels Suqut al-Imam (1987; The Fall of the Imam) and Al Riwaya (2004) were banned in Egypt. Later that year, she declared herself a presidential candidate in Egypt's election, but she withdrew from the race because of political persecution.

MAJOR WORKS

Although Women and Sex quickly became notorious in the Middle East because of its frank discussion of sexuality, El Saadawi was unknown to most Western readers until 1980, when The Hidden Face of Eve was first published in English. As in Women and Sex, the essays in The Hidden Face of Eve openly discuss women's sexuality, including a detailed account of the clitoridectomy El Saadawi was forced to undergo at the age of six and the overall sense of shame that women in patriarchal societies experience. These themes are repeated throughout El Saadawi's writings, both fiction and nonfiction. In Emra'atan fi emra'ah (1968; Two Women in One) the protagonist, Bahiah, goes to college and begins to make her own decisions for the first time. Displeased with his daughter's newfound sense of freedom, her father sells her into marriage. In response, Bahiah flees, but she is eventually caught and imprisoned. El Saadawi's own imprisonment during the years of the oppressive Sadat regime resulted in the autobiographical Memoirs from the Women's Prison. Likewise, her work with inmates at Qanatir Women's Prison—particularly a prostitute named Firdaus—inspired her novel Emra's enda noktat el sifr (1975; A Woman at Point Zero). The novel centers on a character similar to Firdaus, who seeks to gain financial independence by working as a prostitute. Her sense of dishonor, however, leads her to pursue a more traditional career, and although she quickly rises to the top echelon of female workers in her field, the realization that she has not regained her respectability and that she is still selling herself prompts her complete disillusionment with society and return to prostitution. The exploitation and subjugation of women is also the focal point of Mawt el rajoh el waheed ala el ard (1976; God Dies by the Nile) and Ughniyat al-atfal al-da'iriyah (1978; The Circling Song). God Dies by the Nile concerns two sisters who are molested at a young age by a local magistrate. When the official finds that one of them is pregnant, he murders an innocent man from the village and frames the girls' father for the crime. The Circling Song centers on the tradition of honor killing—the murder of a young woman by male members of her family who believe that she has brought shame upon them. The book tells the story of Hamida, a young girl who becomes pregnant after being repeatedly molested by male neighbors and relatives. Although her mother secretly sends Hamida away to protect her from punishment, her twin brother is sent to find and kill her to restore the family honor. El gha'aeb (1965; Searching) is a novel that focuses on a woman's quest for love and self-actualization. When her relationship sours, the protagonist, a high-level government employee, begins to feel she has deluded herself and that it is not possible for her to achieve success in her career because women are not taken seriously in their professions.

The limitations of women's roles in a repressive society are further explored in Suqut al-Imam (1987; The Fall of the Imam) and Ganat wa iblis (1992; The Innocence of the Devil). The latter has been viewed as a modern fable that draws heavily on allegory and magical realism to tell the story of Ganat, a woman who is institutionalized. Many of El Saadawi's recurring themes are brought together in The Fall of the Imam: abuse of power by male officials, rape, exploitation, and the unjust punishment of women for crimes committed by men. The story follows Bint Allah, a woman born out of wedlock whose father is the religious leader of the community. Throughout the novel he continually strives to have her killed and discredits her existence as a sin against God, refusing to acknowledge her as his offspring. Love in the Kingdom of Oil (1993) centers on a woman's disappearance and the response of those who know her, who question her decision to leave behind all that she knows. El Saadawi has also written a two-part autobiography. A Daughter of Isis (1999) covers her childhood and describes her activist role in Egyptian feminism, while Walking through Fire (2002) covers her political battles to change the role of women in Middle Eastern society. In 2004 El Saadawi returned to fiction with Al Riwaya, a novel that features a young Egyptian woman encountering cultural differences while living in Barcelona during antiwar protests in 2004.

CRITICAL RECEPTION

As a feminist in an Islamic country, El Saadawi has provoked the ire of religious, political, and intellectual figures, particularly because of her belief that religion should be a strictly personal matter, with no role in public life. In addition to the fact that her books have been banned by religious authorities, her work has also received negative attention from Middle Eastern literary critics, many of whom maintain that because El Saadawi consciously writes for a Western audience, her works incite traditionalists, thus causing a backlash that further represses the marginalized women El Saadawi wishes to help. Nevertheless, El Saadawi's influence on the formation of a feminist movement in the Middle East has been profound, as has her effort to raise Western awareness of the plight of women living in oppressive societies. Answering the charge that El Saadawi's literary art has suffered because of its polemical nature, Fedwa Malti-Douglas points out, "The debate over art and political engagement is an old one. Nawal El Saadawi is clearly an engagé writer. But her writing is not limited to her political engagement. Indeed, its artfulness supports its politics. It is as complex as the Arabo-Islamic heritage that gave it birth."

PRINCIPAL WORKS

Mozakerat tabiba [Memoirs of a Woman Doctor] (novel) 1958

Talamt el houb (short stories) 1958

Hanam kalil (short stories) 1959

Lahzat sidk (short stories) 1962

El gha'aeb [Searching] (novel) 1965

Emra'atan fi emra'ah [Two Women in One] (novella) 1968

El ma'ra wal ginse [Women and Sex] (nonfiction) 1971

El khait wa ain' el hayat [She Has No Place in Paradise] (short stories) 1972

Emra'a enda noktat el sifr [A Woman at Point Zero] (novel) 1975

al-Mar'ah wa-al-sira al-nafsi (nonfiction) 1976

Mawt el rajoh el waheed ala el ard [God Dies by the Nile] (novel) 1976

El ensan (drama) 1977

El wajh el ary lilma'ra el arabeya [The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World] (nonfiction) 1977

Ughniyat al-atfal al-da'iriyah [The Circling Song] (novel) 1978

Mowt ma'ali el wazin [Death of an Ex-Minister] (short stories) 1979

Mozakerati fi signel nissa [Memoirs from the Women's Prison] (memoirs) 1983

Isis (drama) 1986

Rihlati hawla al-alam [My Travels around the World] (memoir) 1986

Suqut al-Imam [The Fall of the Imam] (novel) 1987

Ganat wa iblis [The Innocence of the Devil] (novel) 1992

Love in the Kingdom of Oil (novel) 1993

North/South: The Nawal El Saadawi Reader (collected essays) 1997

A Daughter of Isis: The Autobiography of Nawal El Saadawi (autobiography) 1999

Walking through Fire: A Life of Nawal El Saadawi (autobiography) 2002

Al Riwaya (novel) 2004

CRITICISM

Fedwa Malti-Douglas (essay date 1995)

SOURCE: Malti-Douglas, Fedwa. "Theorizing an Iconoclast." In Men, Women, and God(s): Nawal El Saadawi and Arab Feminist Poetics, pp. 9-19. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

[In the following essay, Malti-Douglas examines El Saadawi's reputation in the Arab literary world and explains why the author—and feminism in general—is so often excoriated within the Arab Muslim context.]

This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions.

Anastasia Valassopolous (essay date spring 2004)

SOURCE: Valassopolous, Anastasia. "‘Words Written by a Pen as Sharp as a Scalpel’: Gender and Medical Practice in the Early Fiction of Nawal El Saadawi and Fatmata Conteth." Research in African Literatures 35, no. 1 (spring 2004): 87-107.

[In the following essay, Valassopolous discusses the early fiction of El Saadawi and Fatmata Conteth written to expose gender disparities in the practice of medicine.]

In 1831 the first school for midwives in Egypt was established. This school was the "first government educational institution for women in the Middle East, and it was an unprecedented experiment in drawing into social service women who appeared to be more secluded from public activity than women in any other part of the world" (Kuhnke, Lives at Risk 122). In their essays on the importance of this event, Laverne Kuhnke in his work Lives at Risk: Public Health in Nineteenth Century Egypt and Khaled Fahmy in his article "Women, Medicine and Power in Nineteenth Century Egypt" take up differing viewpoints. While Kuhnke seeks to document this improvement in women's employment, Fahmy takes great pains to reveal the forces that ensured these newly trained women had only limited power over their profession. However, what remains undisputed is that medicine was the field deemed appropriate for this "unprecedented experiment." The trained women, referred to as hakimas (female doctors), practiced midwifery, obstetrics, vaccination, and immunization, and were involved in the essential field of preventative medicine. Despite their being given this significant role, Fahmy challenges the material benefits. He questions the ways in which they would have understood their roles and how their decisions and actions would have been criticized on the basis of their gender. In short, Fahmy wants to show

how the people most concerned with this institution, the graduates of the School of Midwives, were not only objects of discipline and control of the state but also conscious subjects who benefited considerably from the chance that was offered to them to improve their position in society.
(38; emphasis added)

Fahmy delineates an important distinction that I shall use to guide my central argument. By referring to the hakimas as "objects of discipline and control" while simultaneously hailing them as "conscious subjects who benefited considerably," he makes clear the fact that practicing medicine itself did not offer a particularly empowering role for these women, but that circulating in public (a symptom of their work?) allowed them to take some control over their lives. As Fahmy elaborates in his article, it is what the practice of medicine allows, that is, the freedom to enter "public activity" that becomes highly significant. He reveals, as I shall depict, that in fact the hakimas' knowledge of medicine and their professional opinions were constantly questioned, that their work was often criticized and demeaned, and that ultimately the school never recruited well enough to flourish. It seems that involvement in the prestigious field of medicine did little to improve public opinion of the hakimas, yet it gave them some control over their lives. In this article I intend to follow a similar trajectory in the medical career of Nawal El Saadawi as well as the female doctors she writes about in her early novels. My aim is to reveal how medical practice presents itself as a lucrative option for women, one that will bring with it respect and sexual equality, yet ultimately promotes gender-biased debates. In some cases gender inequality has a lethal result: in Fatmata Conteth's short story "Letter to My Sisters" the protagonist decides to take her own life because her education and medical career has not coincided with freedom from patriarchal rules and discourse. It seems inevitable that the hakimas, as well as Nawal El Saadawi and Conteth's protagonists, can only "benefit" from their work if they understand it anew and seek change. The medical discourse that is administered to the practicing women of the nineteenth century is not far off from that preached to the medical students in Saadawi's texts, or in fact from Saadawi's own memories of her medical tuition. In a slightly different but nevertheless fascinating way, Conteth reveals the fate of women unable to loosen themselves from the restrictive gendered rules that surround them. In this case, the female doctor gains respect from her work, but this does not qualify her for the respect she seeks from her father and brothers.

Ultimately I shall argue that medicine, an institution that appears to provide agency in and of itself can in fact re-enforce traditional biased gender discourse. It is up to the individual subject to either realize this and understand her role in medicine anew and/or to use her newly found privilege in the public sphere to her advantage. To this end I shall summarize the role of the hakimas in early nineteenth-century Egypt as presented by Kuhnke and Fahmy with the intention of firmly establishing that medicine was the only educational option for women. Moving on from this I want to argue that while medicine remains one of the most distinguished careers for any woman (in this particular context I am referring to Egypt and Ethiopia), it is an institution that does not necessarily promote gender equality. As the surviving documents of the School for Midwives as well as Saadawi and Conteth's texts shall show, a medical career does not guarantee a life free from preconceived notions of sexual and gender imbalance. It is possible to trace, through history, biography, and fiction, that medical knowledge seeks to construct sexual difference as an inherent and biological fact while simultaneously seeking to heal the body.

In his enlightening article on the possibly controversial existence of these medical officers in Egypt, Fahmy notes that

[t]he graduates of the School of Midwives, therefore, appear to have improved their position in society and to have succeeded in crossing race, class, and gender boundaries. By closely following these women to their new posts, however, we find a less rosy picture, and their new position in society appears to be much more problematic than the teleological analysis of the introduction of "modern" science to "traditional" society would like us to believe.
(49)

Fahmy contradicts the more positive view of historians like Kuhnke whom he criticizes for arguing that the School for Midwives offered "women the opportunity to receive modern education in medical science and to be part of the state sponsored system" (36). He points out that there is more underlying this project than simply a will on the part of the modernization process initiated by Muhammad Ali and his French advisors to include women in the work force. In order to substantiate this, Fahmy probes into the conflicts the hakimas had to encounter in their daily work as well as the restrictions they had to obey. In the public sphere of their work, the hakimas' opinions were often challenged; the finest example given is of a hakima who declared a woman to have been murdered in 1857. Her decision was overruled by male physicians (who were obliged by law to double check her verdict) and the "male doctors had to add […] that these female doctors had not been trained properly in practical sciences" (57). Generally speaking, the hakimas occupied a position that was constantly challenged and questioned. However, what is most striking about Fahmy's findings that support his counterargument to that of the hakimas' role in introducing "modern science to traditional society" is that the hakimas were often called upon to inspect the virginity of young girls. The hakimas, it seems, were also expected to act as guardians of purity. Fahmy maintains that "what these cases show is that instead of liberating women, the state was beginning to police female "decency" and "sexuality," taking over these functions from fathers, brothers, and families" (61). In addition, the hakimas could not leave the school before marrying an Egyptian doctor. What Fahmy is arguing is that, yes, of course, the hakimas had access to public space, paid work and a certain amount of authority: simultaneously, however, their opinions were often questioned and their decisions revoked. Moreover, they were asked to perform tasks that curtailed female sexuality and they in turn were not allowed complete freedom in their own personal lives and marriages. In short, "they soon realised that the school was at once both an agent of discipline and regulation and an ‘enlightening’ and even ‘empowering’ institution" (63).

It is this last comment that I wish to now elaborate on in terms of the early fiction of Saadawi and the short story "Letter to my Sisters" by Fatmata Conteth. For the protagonists of these stories, medicine initially holds the key to the improvement of their restricted circumstances. In the absence of an open discourse on sexuality, medicine's seemingly unbiased involvement in the human body appears to hold the key to an unproblematic sexual knowledge. They view the medical profession as prestigious and empowering. However, all the women are disillusioned by the gendered nature of the medical profession that seems unable to dispel traditional notions of female behavior in the areas of sexuality and creativity. First, though, I would like to turn to the personal circumstances surrounding Nawal El Saadawi's disappointment in the institution of medicine before moving to an examination of her fiction (although I am not attempting, nor suggesting a conscious link between the two, I would like to point to moments in both in order to broaden my argument). Lastly, I will briefly turn to Conteth's short story to offer a further example of the restrictive aspects of medical practice for women.

Although Nawal El Saadawi is now better known as the celebrated Egyptian social critic and feminist writer, I want momentarily to take a look at some of her nonfiction commentary regarding her first career; medicine. A chapter entitled "Women and Health in the Arab World" appears in her 1997 The Nawal El Saadawi Reader. It emerges that although Saadawi trained as a general practitioner, her medical career soon took a different turn. As she herself notes:

[A]s my interests widened both professionally and as a writer, I abandoned clinical work, and concentrated on preventative medicine, hygiene and health education. Eventually I became director general of health education in the Ministry of Health. This was the period that permitted me not only to observe how health programmes are carried out in a developing country, but also to witness the inner functionings of the bureaucratic system. This last stage in this rather unusual medical journey led me to psychiatry and mental health [my] interest in psychiatry and mental health was a direct result of my experience as a woman observing and treating other women in rural and urban areas, of my increasing involvement in feminist studies, feminist writings, and women's problems, and of my increasing involvement too in struggle in Egypt and the Arab world.
(53)

Saadawi's interest in mental health, as she claims above, is a "direct result" of her observation of medical practice. It does not take long for an observant woman like Saadawi to come to the conclusion that poor, or misguided medical practice can result in the loss of mental health. In order to express this clearly, I would like to use two long but necessary quotations. Here, Saadawi makes it clear that her medical education was incomplete and isolated:

[T]he problem with health and women in Egypt begins with our system of medical education which we have inherited from the era of British colonial rule. This system of medical education meant that when I graduated as a young doctor from college in 1955 I knew something about the anatomy, physiology, pathology and diseased functioning of the separate parts of the body, but knew almost nothing of these aspects in the body as a whole. I knew even less about the relationship between health, disease, environment and society. I despised preventative medicine as a branch meant for unsuccessful medical doctors and bureaucrats sitting behind desks, or even sweepers, collectors of refuse, and inspectors of food-stuffs.
(59; emphasis added)

In hindsight, then, Saadawi makes the distinction between her schooling as a doctor and her education in general. This particular point is obliquely reminiscent of Kuhnke's concluding comment on his research on female hakimas of the nineteenth century:

Unfortunately, although official and public indifference gradually changed to a more positive attitude, the government failed to create any recruiting ground for future trainees by providing general education for women. A Swiss pedagogue who surveyed the Egyptian educational system in 1872 was astonished to discover that the hakimas' training centre was the only state medical school for women in the country.
(132; emphasis added)

My general assumption here is that although the medical profession was deemed a necessary one for women to be involved with, it did not bring with it a broader, more representative perspective on education. Instead, it taught the hakimas and women doctors to isolate sickness as though it had no resonance or influence on the "environment and society" (Saadawi, The Nawal El Saadawi Reader 59). A side effect of this single-mindedness is unsurprisingly the perpetuation of a strictly gendered view of the sexes as influenced by traditional beliefs in society. Saadawi makes this clear when she claims that

in so far as women are concerned, the academicians and specialists in charge of our education taught us that a woman is a pair of ovaries, two Fallopian tubes, a uterus, a vagina, and a vulva, all paving the way to childbirth, plus breasts for lactating and rather inclined to develop cancer and abscesses […] for us medical students these things added up to make a woman.
(Saadawi, The Nawal El Saadawi Reader 59)

Saadawi is aware of the confused nature of her profession. She understands that unquestioned ideas represented by the "academicians and specialists" resonate in her society. More strongly, however, she can see how biological/medical information related to "females" becomes synonymous to the gendered distinction that is a "women." Even so, Saadawi is willing to re-appropriate the beneficial aspects of her medical training and put them to good use. In order to trace this development in Saadawi's texts I shall engage with some of the critical work surrounding her works before embarking on an investigation of the works themselves.

In her work Men, Women and God(s): Nawal El Saadawi and Arab Feminist Poetics, Freda Malta-Douglas argues that Saadawi gains authority through her double role as physician and writer and contesting the notion of "natural gender inequality" (20). Though a physician herself, Saadawi "denudes medicine and science of part of their magical technological power" (20). Malti-Douglas argues that in fact medicine becomes "a repository of [negative] social power" for Saadawi (20). Medicine retains its role as an active instrument of exclusion, an exclusion that Saadawi experiences and documents acutely. What I want to argue, however, is that Saadawi's texts actually reveal an uncertainty, rather than a negative position, vis-à-vis the dual and simultaneous potential of medicine: that of healing and that of destroying. It is in fact through writing that Saadawi posits fiction as the possibility of re-telling the experience of a destructive medicine.

In The Nawal El Saadawi Reader, Saadawi notes that for her: "writing was a stronger weapon than medicine in the fight against poverty and ignorance" (20). Writing as a weapon comes to figure strongly in the work of Saadawi after she confronts the capacity of medicine to be inhumane. Though medicine is primarily understood as a healing tool, Saadawi's social conscience does not allow her to disassociate the link between "poverty and ignorance" and institutionalized medicine. Acknowledging the limited powers of medicine when pitted against the powers of an unequal social system entices Saadawi into a re-evaluation of her profession, a profession that, nevertheless, gives her credence as a writer. The concept of the "pharmakon," and its application—the medical profession—is crucial in an exploration of Saadawi's concerns.

If medicine is "remedy and poison at the same time [à la fois]"¹ then we need to explore the effects of a word that encompasses such polar meanings and what this means in terms of defining medicine. If "pharmakon" contains diametrically opposed concepts then this could give rise to the inevitable necessity of understanding the correlation of the two available meanings in order to arrive at an understanding of what we mean by medicine. Yoav Rinon comments that "consequently, any intention to choose between the different signifieds" will undermine the word under discussion (372). In short, the double meaning of the word pharmakon exposes itself as having no fixed meaning but a meaning that can be manipulated. Rinon, summarizing the argument put forward by Derrida in "Plato's Pharmacy," writes that "the pharmakon brings death and enables immortality at the same time; it is poison-medicine and not poison or medicine" (375). As such, he/she who applies or directs pharmakon is godlike. If pharmakon essentially is comprised of creative and destructive powers, then the practice of medicine entails the responsibility of administering these two potential forces. What Rinon argues is that the practice of medicine or the use of "pharmakon in general" is also very similar to "writing in general," and it is this argument that can be used effectively in conjunction with Saadawi's role as both writer and physician. Rinon explains that the pharmakon and writing both have the capacity to destroy and create. The multiple and contradictory possibilities of single words (writing/pharmakon) opens up the necessity of having to understand the opposites in order to understand the whole. Through writing fiction, Saadawi moves from a process of intense pathos and faith in the institution of medicine as a healing apparatus, to realizing the poisonous potential of medicine as a regulatory discourse. Saadawi's characters each reach this conclusion, though not all can resolve the healing/poisonous paradox that is medicine (or not) in a unique manner. As Hans-Georg Gadamer has theorized in his essay "Apologia for the Art of Healing":

One can indeed say that the physicians ‘produce’ health by means of their art, but this is not a very precise way of speaking. For what is produced in this way is not a work, an ergon, something quite new that comes into being and confirms the original skill. Rather, it involves the restoration of the health of the sick person, and whether this is actually the result of medical knowledge and ability cannot be directly observed from the restored state of health itself.
(32)

How each persona in the text deals with their relation to the "sick person" and how they feel their gender is implied in this relation is an issue that I shall tackle in a close reading of the texts. Significantly, though, as an author, Saadawi also posits writing as a different type of feminine healing. In her autobiography A Daughter of Isis, Saadawi reveals that even after she was discouraged by her parents to study literature, she "continued to imagine [her]self becoming a writer like Taha Husein" (253). Though entering medical school was a great honor, Saadawi never completely merged or identified with her fellow medical colleagues: "The general atmosphere in medical school was not to my liking," she writes, and continued to write stories and articles throughout her studies (276). Alongside this, Saadawi became immersed in politics, another field in which her "female colleagues refused adamantly to participate in […]" (277). Writing, for Saadawi, as expressed in her polemics, can heal because it is a type of "work" that can approach issues medicine cannot and will not. Intriguingly, Gadamer clarifies a peculiarity associated with medicine:

[A]mong all the sciences concerned with nature the science of medicine is the one which can never be understood entirely as technology [as producing something artificial], precisely because it invariably experiences its own abilities and skills simply as a restoration of what belongs to nature.
(39)

Writing, in a sense, will function as a healing tool for Saadawi, "restor[ing]" to women what "belongs" to them. This healing tool is, however, one that is viewed as creative for her, but destructive for the other whom she will expose. Thus, interestingly, writing retains the dual qualities of the pharmakon, creating and destroying. Furthermore, Saadawi uses the act of writing to re-evaluate medicine and its dual capabilities as well. Saadawi's creative writing ultimately allows her to accept that medicine can have an artistic dimension when not embroiled in determining a gender matrix for her to obey.

I want to view Saadawi's polemics as an attempt to work through the dual possibilities of medicine discursively. One way of doing this is by positioning herself, or her fictional characters, as the illness to be cured, yet an illness that is prediagnosed by the means of healing, medical certainty. It seems that Saadawi explores and experiences this double bind through her fiction. I will argue that Saadawi's entry into this discourse sets her up as critic, reconstructing a counter narrative to that of women who perform their prescribed gender and to the men who script this gender. The ideas of construction and ownership become crucial as the physicians in the novel come to understand that they cannot and do not own their medicine, in the same way that they themselves do not want to be owned and defined by it (or by any regulatory discourse or capitalizing economy). As Gadamer writes:

The work of physicians […] does not remain theirs in any way […] the relationship between the doing and the deed, the making and the made, the effort and the success is here of a fundamentally different, more enigmatic and elusive character.
(33)

Saadawi writes about medicine and about its healing and poisonous capabilities and emerges as a woman who can see the paradox because she understands herself simultaneously as the wound and the healer. It is this realization that enables Saadawi to question the larger claims of medicine and medical knowledge to "act as proof of sexual difference." As medical discourse and practice are discriminatory then we need to examine how this became the norm and how its victims can resist. This is a difficult task as one has to admit that actions are not always a result of free will but that in fact one is subjugated and a subject. Judith Butler has written in connection with this difficulty that

one need only consider how [racial or] gendered slurs live and thrive in and as the flesh of the addressee, and how these slurs accumulate over time, dissimulating their history, taking on the semblance of the natural, configuring and restricting the doxa that counts as "reality." In such bodily productions resides the sedimented history of the performative, the ways in which sedimented usage comes to compose, without determining, the cultural sense of the body, and how the body comes to disorient the cultural sense in the moment of expropriating the discursive means of its own production. The appropriation of such norms to oppose their historically sedimented effect constitutes the insurrectionary moment of that history, the moment that founds the future through a break with the past.
(Butler, Excitable Speech 159)

Saadawi herself admits:

[A]s once [I had] made the link between curative and preventive medicine, then moved to make the link between preventive medicine and social conditions, I now started to make the link between the social, the economic, the political and the cultural in society.
(The Nawal El Saadawi Reader 56)

These links mark the realization of a destructive quality of pharmakon-as-poison in the practice of medicine, the "break" with the sedimented "past." Once these connections have been made, Saadawi embarks upon a reproduction of the poison that she finds in the "social, economic, political and cultural" through her fiction. Saadawi makes the final move in identifying women as a wound in the following statement:

[There was] a special emphasis on women, which I had carried with me from my life as a girl, and which kept developing all the time, nourished by the difficulties I faced as a woman and by more general discrimination against the female sex, in all areas, including that of health, and by a growing consciousness. But gradually artistic writing [novels and short stories] was beginning to occupy a central position in my career.
(56; emphasis added)

Saadawi associates the experience of being a body that is discriminated against with the development of herself as a writer. By writing the pharmakon-as-poison, Saadawi struggles to recapture it as a pharmakon-as-healing and so produce a healed woman as well as a love for the medicine that has wounded but importantly retains the potential to heal. The first step in this direction is identifying at which point Saadawi employs fiction writing to develop finally her polemical claims. In an interview in 1992, Saadawi affirmed:

[T]he effect of fiction on me is deeper than the effect of studies. When I write a study, I am illuminated by the research, but when I write a novel, I know myself better. The same is true for readers. When you read a novel, you become another person. You have a totally new light, and you have a new conception of fighting and courage, of weakness and cowardice. You understand many things about yourself; how weak you are and how strong you can be.
(qtd. in Lemer 32-35)

While Saadawi's status as a doctor was necessary to ensure her political recognition, her fiction celebrates what the polemic cannot always guarantee, a possible crossunderstanding and experience in the uncertainty of the knowledge of other women, albeit fictional creations (where what is said to be impossible is maintained as a possibility). However, Saadawi's polemical ideas do set up, as explained above, her preoccupation as doctor and writer, writing medicine and creative existence. Interestingly, in the work Hysteria, Hypnosis and Healing: The Work of J. M. Charcot, A. R. G. Owen documents that

the word medicine itself results from primitive practice, being named after Medea the mother of witchcraft; that is to say, magic and the remains of primeval and proscribed religions. She was also the mistress of pharmacon, or drugs, including not merely herbs and samples of empirically proven efficacy, but also magical potions whose power was supposed to derive not only from inherent properties but from the rites of preparation and the spells laid upon them.
(emphasis added)

This suggests, to me, that spells or words (or Rhetoric, to which Plato/Gadamer have likened medicine) are a component in the healing process. Writing then, the production of words, comes to figure as a medicine that has the capacity to heal, as well as giving form to a healing medicine.²

Furthermore, in Saadawi's polemical works we witness the birth of medical symbolism (which continues in the early novels studied here). In her forthright writings that question gender-based inequalities, she uses the cant of the operating theater in an attempt to freeze and display the violence acted out on women. In revenge/response, the language remains rebellious, violent, and ripping. Saadawi recognizes the panic that will emerge at the site of the dominant discourse when faced with the threats of minorities (like herself) who are not afraid of "words written by a pen sharp as a scalpel that cuts through tissue to expose the throbbing nerves and arteries embedded deep in a body," a body that is yearning for an "expression that it fears to experience." (Hidden Face of Eve 3) Saadawi realizes that attaching sex to medicine inevitably condemns it to become forever joined to a politics that cannot by extension ever be separated from the economics of patriarchy. The "medical profession, [which] like any other profession in society, is governed by the political, social and moral values which predominate, and like other professions is one of the institutions which is utilized more often than not to protect these values and perpetuate them." (37)

Nawal El Saadawi struggles for a marriage of science and art, a marriage that will eventually "humanize medicine" and hopefully in turn re-fashion gender attributes and expectations (The Nawal El Saadawi Reader 217). She places herself at the crossroads of the technical and philosophical, a healer of the body, as well as of the mind and ideas. Ultimately, woman is produced as a wound and through wounding. Thus, there is arguably no original state of wholeness and well being that is "woman" (apart from maybe early infancy). Writing, therefore, may act to repair the wounding of woman. Saadawi repeats in her writing the traumas (wounds)—writing thus as poison—but in doing so does not humiliate and traumatize in turn, reinforcing the patriarchal devaluation of women. Instead, she treats her women characters with sympathy, compassion and understanding. Thus, she restores their dignity and value without in any way denying their suffering. However, this restoration (unlike the restoration of health in medicine) could be said to be a means of giving to the women what they have never had accorded to them as women. So, therefore, Saadawi creates a human dignity—what ought to be the original state for all—for women. Rather than masculinizing women (an accusation often targeted at Saadawi by critics) she offers a way of humanising women as women. How discursive medicine contributes to notions of gender will now be located and how the characters oppose these confines will be explored.

In the early fiction discussed here, Saadawi's two heroines are plagued by a familiar crisis of women who begin to question discriminatory behavior based on gender. In Two Women in One, Bahiah is a young girl forced into medical school to please her family. Through the faculty of medicine she discovers the prejudices and paradoxes created and upheld in the name of patriarchal domination and damnation. Our unnamed heroine in Memoirs of a Woman Doctor studies medicine feverishly, mistakenly believing that it is the tool that will make her equal to men. Both women battle with the meaning of "womanhood" that has been informed through their medical training, the only discourse on sex and gender that remains readily available for them. Both experience the horrors of a society that demands women curtail their desire and forces them to lead an existence entrenched in discourses of obstruction and contradiction.

What I seek predominantly is to specify as what point the characters in Saadawi's texts question the incomplete medical knowledge that diagnoses their sexual identity. Also, at what juncture before medical training do they ask questions related to gender that remain unanswered, unfulfilled, leading as it were, perforce, to an investigation of gender matters through the discourse of medicine (a profession that promises an explanation?). What makes the characters seek these answers and finally overcome the monolithic glory of science/medicine, and to what end and at what expense?

In Saadawi's fiction, medical knowledge of the body is perceived first as enlightening, yet subsequently constricting (healing yet poisonous) and this self-same movement is the textual experience of Saadawi as author and the nonfictional experience of Saadawi as woman; to heal through the text and to re-understand medicine as healing.

Malti-Douglas argues that Saadawi "develops [a] sexual politics of medicine" by using it as a "vehicle for women to regain their lost power" and by "making it the focus of her own call for the integration of traditionally male and female qualities." Women want to understand the power of medicine in order to mold a new medicine, a caring and curing medicine. Saadawi struggles with her desire to be an artist in her writing and in her role as physician. She fights to be human and physician, a struggle comparable to those of her fictive protagonists. Saadawi's achievement is that she succeeds in admitting a certain humanity/humility into the order and practice of medicine and thereby of women within the medical profession understood as women and physicians.

In fact, Saadawi's "writings reflect a rebellion against a biology considered destiny […] medicine, science and the physician are placed in a dialectical relationship with the feminist problematic of gender and power" (Al-Ali, Gender Writing/Writing Gender 35). Medicine, science and the physician are re-thought and rather than helping women "regain their lost power" as Malti-Douglas suggests, this action aids women in forging a new understanding that was never there to begin with. Medicine re-understands its role as restorer, an art that cannot see what it produces, for, to use Gadamer's words again,

there always corresponds a certain doubt about the existence or the efficacy of such healing skills. Tyche and techne, fate and art, stand in a particular tense and antagonistic relationship here.
(33)

Tension and antagonism indeed figure deeply in the Saadawian text.

This section will concentrate on the social bodies that define a young girl's world in terms of her sexuality and gender as well as the sources available to her to understand these terms and finally to question them. In Two Women in One (1975) Bahiah's disgust for her breasts begs the question: what has given her reason to feel such animosity towards her own body? A dissection class early on in the novel offers her the space to pose the question that informs her hatred of female composites, "what does it mean to be a girl?":

When Dr. Alawi heard the question, he dipped his metal forceps into the open stomach of the dead woman whose body lay before him and took out her womb: a small; pear-sized triangle of flesh soft on the surface and wrinkled within […] ‘As for man, here he is.’ With the tips of his forceps, he held up the penis. She saw a wrinkled piece of black skin like old excrement.
(17)

This response categorizes woman and man for Bahiah and only serves to highlight the organic and reproductive functions. Bahiah is caught between being somewhat aware that she is discursively restricted by her body and yet ignorant of the capacity of this body, unable therefore, as yet, to shatter the impasse. Saadawi uses the confused intellect of a medical student to comment on the misconceptions that arise from ignorance and a restrictive sexual discourse. Although Bahiah works with the body she still finds it difficult to interpret the signs of "sexual tension" that surround her, though she feels she can identify something:

When an elbow edged sneakily into a girl student's breast, her lips would part almost imperceptibly. With an inaudible suppressed whisper the girl would say "Ah…." and place her bulging satchel protectively over her chest.
(23)

The satchel, bulging with anatomy books, ironically covers a breast, emblem of honor and purity. Sexual tensions soon find release in the narrator's voice, preempting a realisation on behalf of the protagonist:

Each male student would unconsciously take a bite of his satchel and chew it. When he realised that is was only leather he would flush and try to hide the holes all over his bag with the palms of his hand. In the tram he could not stand it any more. He would find himself inadvertently pressed against some woman's breast. At midnight he would close his anatomy books and go to bed, but the body would refuse to sleep, for the stimulant would have congealed like the tip of a boil needing only the slightest touch to burst.
(24)

Saadawi finds it impossible to distance the medical scene of instruction from the bodily/material reality. Sexual desire is understood as a sore (since it is not pedagogically situated at the site of pleasure) and sexuality becomes a disease incurable by the anatomy books that cannot effectively act as substitute. Sexuality is bequeathed hysterical importance which the readily available discourse, the medical, does not address directly, and simultaneously, through ignoring and neglecting to incorporate psychological alternatives, leaves the protagonist with little room for complex reasoning. Saadawi however, sets up this one-dimensional medical discourse only to later infuse it with sexual possibility. Pharmakon-as-poison is identified and contaminates the text. With Saadawi's use of animal/medical terms, the text almost transforms into a medical discourse itself, allowing for a chameleon effect where the lens of the physician sees differently from the eye of the reader. The conflation of these two results in a text that tries to reduce medical knowledge whilst performing it. Thus, the girls at the medical school:

walked like reptiles, legs together, and if their thighs happened to separate briefly, they would quickly snap together again. The girls pressed their legs together as if something valuable might fall if they separated. They held their leather satchels bulging with anatomy books against their chests, hiding something valuable from the male students' gaze and sharp elbows.
(77)

Again, women perform the medical discourse of materiality that is however used to make assumptions on gender and gender limitations. The girls use the anatomy books, containing exposures of the body, to cover up their bodies, whose exposure they fear. Though the two bodies are, figuratively speaking, the same, the cultural conceptions and social structures that inform the medical students mark a distinction between the body that is medically exposed and the body that will culturally constitute itself as exposed or naked. In the act of covering their breasts with anatomy books, this self-same restriction re-enacts itself. Overwhelmed with the hypocrisy at the institution of medicine that leads to such suppressive and subjugated behaviour, Bahiah unconsciously questions the rigidity of a social system that does not recognise the complications brought about by the rejection of sexual discourse.

In Memoirs of a Woman Doctor (first published in 1957), our heroine's (significantly nameless) first experience of a man's naked body early on in the novel and in her medical training is an encounter with a cadaver. Though just bones and skin, she finds a certain justice when, naked and helpless, man falls "from his throne" and ends up on a "dissecting table next to a woman", the only place where woman appears as potentially equal to man (25):

Science proved to me that women were like men and men like animals. A woman had a heart, a nervous system and a brain exactly like a man's […] I was delighted by this new world which placed men, women and the animals side by side, and by science which seemed a mighty, just and omniscient god; so I placed my trust in it and embraced its teachings.
(32)

In the absence of an-other discourse, the protagonist continues to embrace science as the great equaliser. Saadawi's novel traces the gradual realisation that science is not an independent institution operating in the name of some absolute truth. It can, and does function as any other hierarchical institution. A mis-reading of corpses as potential sites of gender equality results in the inevitable aggrandising of medicine that, in its study of the body-without-pleasure, falsely promises an unsexed research of bodily functions. For the protagonist though, the god that is science, however, degenerates rapidly into a "merciless god." When asked to examine a man who is reluctant to undress, the protagonist senses the shame of the man in question. Impatient, the professor in charge slaps the patient into submission:

The god of science knows no mercy and no shame. How harsh he was! How much I suffered in my worship of him! The body of a person lost all living respect and dignity and became exactly like a dead body under my gaze and my searching fingers, and disintegrated in my mind into a jumble of organs and dismembered limbs.
(34)

The shock that accompanies the realisation that medicine retains, and to a degree, sustains a discourse of sex and power, though it seems not to, makes it obligatory for the doctor to eradicate these supposed truths before she can practise her art. Yet, the realisation that medicine plays this double game, asking us to ignore sexual discourse in favour of body parts, results in its de-thronement. Medicine reveals its weaknesses and gradually loses its authority over sexual discourse.

Yet, it is the study of medicine, or so the protagonist thinks in Memoirs of a Woman Doctor, that will explain and take away the shame:

[M]edicine was a terrifying thing. It inspired respect, even veneration, in my mother and brother and father. I would become a doctor then, study medicine, wear shiny steel-rimmed spectacles […] I'd make my mother tremble with fright and look at me reverently; I'd make my brother terrified and my father beg me for help. I'd prove to nature that I could overcome the disadvantages of the frail body she'd clothed me in, with its shameful parts both inside and out.
(23)

In Saadawi's autobiography A Daughter of Isis, she recalls her mother's words in relation to Nawal's choice of career, "You know, Nawal, who seeks admission to the School of Literature. Those who are no good at school or have low grades. You may become a famous doctor like Ali Ibrahim [one of the first and foremost surgeons of Egypt] and you'll be able to look after us free." (253, emphasis added) In Saadawi's fiction, medical knowledge is problematized because though it promises knowledge of the workings of the body (thus by extension the ability to heal the body), it also bestows a certain prestige onto females practitioners. Problems arise when the institution and status of medicine seem to dictate gendered behavior.

Bahiah, in Two Women in One, is disgusted with the "suppressed feminine laughter [that sounds like] gasps of eternally unquenchable deprivation" (13). Her initiation into medicine is originally understood as that which will mask this deprivation. Medicine, she primarily hopes, will free her from the homogenizing culture that envelopes her society, a society ignorant of or submissive to the underlying powers that mobilise it. Initially, Bahiah sees nothing but "sameness." She views others and observes that "[they looked as though] they bore some eternal burden," is this the burden of the same (14)? Through diagnosing sameness she prognoses herself as different in her search for an identity based on fact. By identifying the other as not an individual, she creates her own individual insightful self, the self that sees that all "mannerisms, gestures and meanings were alike to the point of suffocation" and that it was as if all "human beings [had been] transformed by some potent power, by some terrible, non-human force that had turned them into other, inhuman beings" (14-15). In a sense, Bahiah views the performed element of human existence in everyone but herself. By privileging thought, Bahiah believes that through viewing medicine as a source of knowledge, she can, in defiance, take on a masculine role (resting one leg on the table as the other firmly rests on the ground) unlike the other girls who "[press] their thighs together to protect something they were afraid might fall" (7). Typical of Saadawian irony, Bahiah feels firm on what is actually shaky ground.

Bahiah though moves on, firstly to painting, and finally to an involvement in the Egyptian nationalist cause (politics). Bahiah believes that art is a product that she can produce from her body and that is free of the contradictions located at the heart of the institution of medicine. Through pursuing her artwork, Bahiah finds one way to express herself using her body. She performs onto canvas or a piece of paper and it feels as real as touching her body: "She could do it with a pen-point on a blank sheet of paper; she could touch it with her fingertip just as certainly as she could touch her body, feeling its external boundaries under her clothes" (25). Bahiah feels the contours of herself with this act of drawing. By imagining outlines, she then performs them onto the paper, in turn re-defining herself as a being with boundaries and shape, features distinguishable from other features. In this way, I feel, she distances herself from the clinical image of woman as a womb lodged between forceps. This knowledge emerges as one that provides direct contact with the body as a surface of experience that a medical knowledge alone cannot provide for her.

However, Bahiah does feel alone in this discovery. Her disappointment with the futility of it all culminates in her internal questioning of whether any of the medical students have an appreciation of beautiful things; medicine here is divorced from its creative possibility and ultimately from its healing possibilities. Bahiah struggles to make art important and notes others' lack of appreciation: "what good was a painting, a story or a piece of music to them" (39)? Bahiah finds no place for the beauty of creativity in the dissecting halls; all she finds is the destruction of the human body.

Towards the end of the text, Bahiah is forced into an arranged marriage. As she moves towards the pre-prepared wardrobe in her husband's house, Saadawi writes that Bahiah

found night-dresses with cut-away fronts, backs and bellies, kinky underwear, perfumes, red, white and green bottles of make-up, eye brushes, slippers with red roses on them, hand towels, toilet soap, hair-removing cream, deodorants, and massage and body oils. Women's tools in their married life are sexual. A girl moves from her father's house to a husband's and suddenly changes from a non-sexual being with no sexual organs to a sexual creature who sleeps, wakes, eats and drinks sex. With amazing stupidity, they think that those parts that have been cut away can somehow return, and that murdered, dead and satiated desire can be revived.
(101, emphasis added)

Women, she surmises, are expected to add and subtract pieces of their body as though the process were a surgical one. How can desires be "cut" and "revived"? The surgical aspect of medicine, the removing and adding of body parts, is compared to the impossible task of successfully doing the same for emotions and desires, as well as the brutality and violence with which it is expected to be done. Ultimately Bahiah's resistance to these expectations lead her to shun her new husband's sexual advances. Her infamous retort resounds like an echo throughout: "Anyway, who told you that I'm a woman?" (102)?³ Bahiah steals out the next morning, knowing that there will be scandal when her father comes "looking for [the virginal] blood" that he will not find (103).

The institution of medicine is not embraced as a possible solution, yet its paradoxical promises are revealed as a non-solution. Bahiah is defeated yet does not allow herself to live within the fiction that she has revealed. The text performs her disappointment by not allowing her to envision a different ending, a new possibility. This novel is testimony to the difficulty in revealing the fiction that is womanhood. The title Two Women in One points accurately to this dilemma. In a sense, Bahiah cannot envision another future for herself because the shock is too overwhelming, the sense of loss too immense. The text, in offering no alternative, performs the destructive as well as the creative forces that it is capable of, as the discourse of medicine informs a destructive knowledge of gender and sexuality when it collapses them into one. She eventually changes direction and throws herself into the nationalist cause.

The nameless protagonist in Memoirs of a Woman Doctor however, progresses from her fear of femininity to embracing what she thinks will help her overcome this fear and force others to respect her; medicine and science. She says, "I began to search constantly for weak spots in males to console me for the powerlessness imposed on me by the fact of being female" (11). This becomes the disastrous driving force in the early part of her life. As she starts to mature, develop and discover her changing body, so her revulsion becomes more poignant; "if only I could die! I didn't recognise this body which sprang a new shame on me every day, adding to my weakness and my preoccupation with myself. What would grow on my body next? What other new symptom would my tyrannical femininity break out in" (12)? It is difficult to tell whether these are feelings of true hatred, or, misdirected fears associated with the prohibitions and restrictions placed on these body parts/additions. However, the institution of medicine brings more questions than answers. She realises that while her body seems to be developing and maturing, something is lacking. She fails mentally to accompany her bodily changes. Furthermore, mind and body become so segregated in the practice of medicine that she needs to re-experience, almost re-learn her body and her sexuality from scratch. It is the bringing together of the mind and body through the re-evaluation of medicine, and through this a better understanding of the working and mis-working of medicine, that can be located in a reading of Memoirs.

At the onset of doubts connected to her profession as physician, the protagonist decides to re-evaluate the promises made by medicine to understand how she has been misled for so long. As soon as the protagonist begins to feel that her stethoscope has indeed become the "hangman's noose" (clothing in this extreme situation becomes part of the discourse of medicine) she flees the confining walls of medicine, flees from the horrific realisation of pharmakon-as-poison (35). Alone and far from her profession she senses that "feeling" can sometimes be truer than "reason" (42). If a sacrifice to science has been made and this sacrifice has been emotion, she is then ready to give up this sacrifice and feel again. Saadawi writes of the young doctor that

for the first time in [her] life [she] was feeling without thinking, feeling the warm sun on [her] body and thought about the debased, imprisoned womanliness of woman; the arrogant overbearing masculinity of man; and the limited, ineffectual chatter of science.
(42)

She feels as though she is coming to life again and experiencing a body long forgotten (if ever experienced). Healing in this respect is re-established, in the first instance, with oneself. Through a direct experience with the body outside the confines of duty and profession, the protagonist is able to experience herself, alone. Once this has been foregrounded, Saadawi sets the scene for the possible re-evaluation of medicine as well, thus, I want to argue, making a direct link between the two types of reconciliation.

One night on an emergency call a look of despair in a patient's eyes reminds the physician that he is "more than a liver, a spleen or a collection of guts and entrails" (45). Medicine, at this moment, becomes a healing tool invested with humanity. As her patient suffers, so does she and her relief equals his at the moment of recovery. She feels, for the first time, a love which gives meaning to the pain she has watched and endured and an answer to the questions hitherto left unanswered. The physician feels a certain cohesion in her role as healer and in the patient's role as a receptor of her powers. In The Performance of Healing Laderman and Roseman argue that

there is a strong notion of healing as performance: as purposive, contextually-situated interaction; as multimedia communication and metacommunicative or "framed" enactment; as historically contingent fusing past traditions and memories with present circumstances and problems; as emotionally, sensuously and imaginatively engaging; as reflective and transformative.
(2)

Saadawi expands her polemics when rendering this particular moment. The healing moment is a creative moment when viewed as a performative one that can bring together knowledge and experience. Compassion and an understanding (rather than a technical medical result) mark the distinction between a successful healing process and an unsuccessful one. Invigorated with this new knowledge, yet frozen with the fear and regret of a wasted youth and wasted sexuality, our heroine returns to her home in the city. Haunted day and night by the lack of love (another unhealed wound), she imagines an encounter that will fill the new gap that she feels. Importantly, the experience of her own body, as well as the invigorating experience of being a potential healer, brings with it the need for an other with whom to communicate and share this newly acquired knowledge. A man who tells her that he desires a "partner," not a "servant," seduces the heroine, believing she has found a solution to the unhealed wound (55). Beguiled by what seems to be an equal and liberating proposition, the heroine thinks she has found someone who can finally understand her as well as her philosophical feelings on truth and justice. Although she marries him she is soon disillusioned when she realizes that her profession has done little to change her actual social situation. Amongst the talk of advances and balances that go hand in hand with marriage, it is evident that, doctor or not, she is first of all a woman, signing, as she so poignantly describes it, her "death warrant" (62). Her husband soon smoothly inhabits a superior role and inscribes his authority almost immediately:

‘I'm the man.’
‘So what?’
‘I'm in charge.’
‘In charge of what?’
‘Of this house and all that's in it, including you.’
The first signs of rebellion were showing themselves: his feeling of weakness in front of me had been translated inside him into a desire to control me.
‘I don't want you going out every day,’ he said.
‘I don't go out for fun. I work.’
‘I don't want you examining men's bodies and undressing them.’ […]
He'd reached the conclusion that it was my work which endowed me with the strength that prevented him controlling me.
(63)

The husband fears the power that his wife assumes in her role as physician and what it may do to her position as a "woman." However, endowed with the ultimate power of rule, he pronounces his judgement. The protagonist's reaction is hard and fast. In an unpredictable and innovative move, she decides to go against all social opinion and convention, she leaves her husband and begins to perform illegal abortions. Again, medicine fails to bring with it the respect she had hoped for, the recognition it purports to em/body. Yet she redefines the significance that medicine can have. Unlike the nineteenth century hakimas who were obliged to check for virginity, she performs abortions and this move allows her to use medicine as an empowering tool to help young women. However, the more successful a doctor she becomes, the more the feeling of emptiness becomes as large as a "giant" (84). The more immersed she becomes in her "art," the more she feels it necessary to become a sexual being, and to be respected as an intellectual and as a woman.

The moment of unity comes at the end of Memoirs of a Woman Doctor when an emergency call interrupts the meeting between her and her newly found beloved. He accompanies her to the patient and helps her with a dangerous blood transfusion. Significantly, though she tries to tell him she could not have done it without his help, he tells her that she could have. In a moment of clarity, the protagonist refuses the symbolic amount of one Egyptian pound given to her by the poor patient. Though this scene is rather condescending and collapses issues of class and social equality, symbolically, it is the moment where pharmakon-as-healing is re-instead once. A restored faith in the humanity of the pharmakon as well as in the love object replaces a negative perception of both that dominates sections of the book respectively. The protagonist that accepts a return to medical practise and pharmakon-as-healing (with knowledge of its poisonous potential) emerges as the most complete of Saadawi's heroines. Unlike the conclusion of Two Women in One, Memoirs of a Woman Doctor offers an idyllic resolution to the complex set of problems that we have witnessed so far. The two moments that converge at the close of the narrative, that of recognition and that of re-understanding medicine as an art that need not produce anything tangible (the negation of the symbolic amount suggests that healing cannot be quantified and if it is it remains arbitrary), reaffirms that there is a performance that can be satisfactory if understood in certain terms. In short, the heightened moments between physician and patient as well as those between lovers are moments that produce ideas rather than identifiable objects. In Memoirs of a Woman Doctor we witness a reconstitution of medicine as a healing art.

Fatmata A. Conteth's short story "Letter to my Sisters" was entered in a competition for women writers of Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Botswana in 1985. Out of the eight hundred entries, Conteth made the shortlist of sixteen. In terms of content this tale is not remarkable; a young girl decides to take her own life because of the pain she suffers at being treated as an inferior being by her father. However, only three years prior to the publication of the English version of Saadawi's Memoirs of a Women Doctor, Conteth finds it necessary, if not absolutely essential, to discuss the predicament of women and education and how this further intensifies the notion of injustice within a domestic sphere. Like Saadawi's protagonists, Conteth's heroine suffers more after she has had a glimpse of the spiritual freedom that education and a profession can offer. However, once faced with traditional values and patriarchal mores, this education becomes a burden that reveals its worthlessness in the absence of dignity and respect from one human being towards another. The story is in the form of a letter written by a young woman to her sisters. N'damba is a physician who has returned from her education abroad to practise medicine in her home village in Ethiopia. It is the eve of her suicide and N'damba writes a farewell note explaining the reasons for taking her own life. In many ways, the use of the letter form here is very significant, as N'damba wants to be sure that her suicide can be of some benefit to her sisters. On the last page of her letter she writes, "I hope that as a result of my action you will in time enjoy the softer terrain of this world" (141). Though it is clear that N'damba is unhappy with her life back at home amongst her strict father and brothers, it also seems that she is ultimately saddened by her education that did not embrace and tackle the possible problems that she finds herself experiencing. Remembering her most treasured moments as a doctor, N'damba tells her sisters of her favourite patient, Ya-Yanoh:

She was my favourite patient. I treated her like our mother. She told me I had restored her dignity and respect. So when she returns to her village, walking straight and confident, people will regard her as a human being.
(136)

The doctor-patient relationship here is an enviable one that involves respect on both sides. However, this type of reverence does not infiltrate other aspects of N'damba's life. In her attempt to justify her suicide, she tells her sisters that she is unable to live in her father's household, and at the same time will not abandon it since that would result in shame for him. Her reasons range from the unequal and unfair treatment of the women in the household to the fact that she is forbidden to wear trousers and have boyfriends. Ultimately, N'damba cannot understand or accept the discrepancy between her father's preferential and even lax treatment of her brothers. She questions the point of her education and how it has not really changed her circumstances, and even worst, how it has made her want things that she cannot have:

Why then did I have to spend so much of my time going to college?’ I asked myself. I would have been like my mother. Mama accepted and believed that she was born to serve Baba or any other man that would have her as a wife. Mama would never question anything Baba said to her, good or bad. Mama, whose once seductive figure had now become lost in fat, because Baba had scolded her that she was giving him a bad name by staying slim. Baba likes fat women. So Mama became fat. I once told her that from a professional point of view her fat would kill her. I meant it. She laughed and ignored me. ‘If you disobey your husband, you will not go to heaven.’ She was sure and very serious about it. I laughed and Mama thought I was stupid.
(139)

This is a an important paragraph as it reveals the crux of N'damba argument. Her professional opinion signifies next to nothing when pitched against male authority and tradition. Her medical career is useful insofar as it showers prestige and money on her family. She bitterly describes what her brothers will think when they learn of her suicide:

They will all cry because they will remember what I used to do for them at the end of Ramadan month and on Christmas. They will miss the presents that I used to work so hard to get for them just to make them happy. The older brothers will probably hate me for killing myself. They will never stop to think, to understand and appreciate why I did what I did. But that is their business, they are all just like Baba, full of their manhood.
(135)

Her career does not bring with it respect from the male members of her society and it does not allow her the independence she craves. Her own mother, who takes refuge in the words of God and of her husband, who here, for all intents and purposes, are one and the same, ignore her opinion.

Ultimately, N'damba cannot face a life that is surveyed and judged by the overwhelmingly male dominance within her society. Although her medical career has been rewarding it has not prepared her for the restrictive life that she must endure. Upon discovering that her father has arranged her marriage she makes the final decision not to be a part of this life that she cannot escape. Similar to the reaction of the doctor's husband in Memoirs of a Woman Doctor, (see page 29) N'damba's father tightens his grip on her as he witnesses the desires she seeks to fulfil as a result of her education. As she reminds her sisters, she has been particularly sensitive to this authoritarian attitude since her return:

You all remember the incident when Baha threatened to disown me. I am referring to the day I wore trousers. I had just come from England and thought I had grown out of that type of family control. Baba said it was a big shame, a dishonour to the family for a girl, his daughter, to put on trousers. ‘This is why I said that Western education breeds immorality. You have come here now to teach your own younger sisters bad manners. God have mercy on you. I tell you, hell fire will consume you for this!’
(138)

The education that N'damba has received meets its antithesis when she is back in her close knit family. Here, in broader terms than those of Saadawi, any education, not only medicine, is a weapon that can be used against you. In particular, the immeasurable products of medicine as argued by Gadamer, are something to be feared, particularly in the hands of a woman. Rather than simply aligning herself to the seemingly ‘natural’ role of daughter, wife and mother, N'damba ventures into the realm of technology. Here, she challenges the so-far unquestioned gendered notions of the place of women outside scientific rationalism. According to her father, a "Western education" has lead to immorality, whereas N'damba understands her medical training to have brought with it respect and empowerment. These vastly diverse and irreconcilable interpretations of her education boil down to a predetermined (highly gendered) expectation that her father, and the patriarchal community that she inhabits, have of her. By choosing suicide, N'damba also takes the final step away from her therapeutic role, thereby undermining the medical profession itself. Although it is not clear by what method N'damba chooses to take her own life, we can presume self-poisoning a possibility. Here, pharmakon-as-poison is reinstated as Conteth's heroine chooses to use the means to cure in order to die. And yet, her dying words reveal a desire that her action cure the wounds caused by the categories of gender. She writes to her sisters:

You may not approve of this method of helping you to be free, to be women of dignity, pride and self-esteem. I have taken what I consider a courageous course of action to assert my dignity and yours too. I am writing this unusual letter to justify my action to be free. I hope I am also helping women of my community.
(136, emphasis added)

Unable to even imagine a life of enslavement where she can no longer derive respect from her profession, and optimistically foreseeing a potential outcome from her death, namely political mobilization from the women in her community, N'damba prefers to die, thereby exercising a personal choice.

Saadawi tackles difficult issues through an exploration of a controversial profession for women in the Middle East, medicine. This gives her a platform from which to criticise the knowledge derived from medicine on issues regarding gender and sex that can be as inconclusive as they can be discriminatory for the female physicians themselves. In the absence of a body of information regarding sexual matters and philosophical gender understanding, attitudes towards medicine, I feel, work effectively as an investigative trope. Saadawi brings science and art together and marries critical dissection and factual knowledge with creative compassion and vision, though her characters are not always successful. Similarly, Conteth shows us how institutionalized education can be destructive when not accompanied by reform in issues of gender and sexuality. In this respect, Conteth's and Saadawi's protagonists suffer injustices similar to those of the hakimas of the nineteenth century. Lured into a challenging profession that promises freedom from a life of inequality, they are soon disappointed by the existence of a strong male-dominated discourse located at the heart of the medical institution and the societal structure itself. Saadawi and Conteth take great pains to show the disillusionment suffered at the centre of this conflict and the difficulty of restoring dignity into their profession. Through fiction, and in Conteth's case, through the medium of a letter to be read after the heroine's death, this conflict is re-lived via the

words written by a pen sharp as a scalpel that cuts through tissue to expose the throbbing nerves and arteries embedded deep in a body.
(Saadawi, The Hidden Face of Eve 3)

Notes

1. See Fedwa Malti-Douglas's Men, Women and God(s): Nawal El Saadawi and Arab Feminist Poetics for an elaboration on this topic.

2. See "The Rhetoric of Jaques Derrida I: ‘Plato's Pharmacy’" by Yoav Rinon, who discusses this double use of the pharmakon.

3. This is reminiscent of Bahiah in her younger years who exclaims, "Who told you that I am a girl?"

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