I am writing this essay in English. English is not my mother tongue. I was born in Egypt and I live and write in Arabic. Words are inseparable from their history, from politics, economics, and culture, so I feel the limitations of writing in a foreign language, feel as though my tongue is no longer a part of my body, of my mind, and my spirit. It has been sent into exile. Words in Arabic have their own music inseparable from meaning, content and shape just as the flesh is inseparable from the spirit.
Since music cannot be translated the spirit of words is lost in translation and I always feel disappointed whenever I read any of my novels in translation. Even the word of God is changed when translated from Arabic to English. When I read the Quran in the English translation I notice the difference. It is a very great difference. Many years ago when I was a young child I wondered why God spoke only in Arabic, why he was monolingual. He was omnipotent and should have known all languages.
But I prefer to write this essay directly in English. Of course, my English is not like American English, or British English, but I prefer it to a text translated from my Arabic.

In my early childhood, before I had learnt to write I used to touch the letters of the alphabet with the tips of my fingers as they lay on paper, or draw them with wings like birds so they could fly. Ever since I was born I have dreamt of flying up in the sky away from my body. But my body was bound to the earth by a mysterious force.

Since the day I was born I have been an exile. I felt alienated from my own body and from everything around me. I was born into the sorrow and misery of village life, of a village composed of huts made of straw and mud, that looked like dark caves burrowing into the bank of the Nile. Faces around me were shrunken, their flesh consumed by hard labour in the fields, their skin burnt by a smouldering sun.

Such was the face of "Om Mahmoud", the village midwife, who helped my mother to give birth to me. When she did not see the sacred male organ between my thighs she dropped me into a basin of water and left me to drown.

This feeling of exile has never left me. Death has continued to hover over my head in the form of a tall woman dressed in black like the village mid-wife, or of a huge man like "King Farouk" with a red fez on his head, or an English soldier wearing a helmet, or of Satan "Iblis" with two horns sticking out of his head, and a third horn sticking out of his lower abdomen.

I heard the word God for the first time from my grandfather. In my dreams God looked like my grandfather, or like Satan "Iblis", but without the two horns in his head. The lower horn was there since all these creatures belonged to the same sex.

The feeling of "exile" from my body increased when I reached puberty. Like all Muslims I had to believe in both the Quran and the Bible. In these holy books women were looked upon as inferior to men. Menstrual blood was considered impure in the Quran but even more impure in the Bible. In the Old Testament if a woman gave birth to a male child she was not purified from her blood until thiry-three days had passed, But if she gave birth to a female child, she remained unclean for sixty-six days. Once she had been cleansed she had to slaughter a lamb, and a female pigeon or a female dove, and offer them to God, to be forgiven for her sins, and be cleansed completely from the impurity of her blood. But in the Quran God did not request women to offer Him anything in order to be cleansed. He was more merciful towards poor women who had nothing to offer. In my school, the girls felt alienated from the holy books, whether they were Coptic (Egyptian Christians), Jewish or Muslim.

Alienation from God is a form of exile, exile from religion, from the family, from history, culture, and politics, from the whole of society and the nation-state.

Ever since birth I have lived with this feeling of exile. It became greater when I travelled abroad to foreign countries because in them I was described as an "Alien".

Since the first moments in my life, when the village mid-wife dropped me into the basin of water, I have had to struggle against death. I survived I do not know how. When I was a child my mother supported me, but after I stood up on my own two feet she left me to struggle alone.

In my dreams I used to speak to God. I kept asking him: you are supposed to be just, so why do you favour men more than women, and the rich more than the poor? God used to answer me in an angry tone, and order me to be obedient and not ask questions. But I kept asking him questions because I was not convinced by what was written in his books. The more I studied them the less I was convinced.

In the Bible Eve is alone responsible for sin. In the Quran both Adam and Eve are responsible. According to the Quran, they both committed sin. But we learn that "Adam received words from God and was forgiven for his sin.". God used the single tense not the plural to indicate that Adam alone and not Eve was absolved from wrong doing. I could not think that God did not know grammar, did not know the difference between the single and plural.

My father encouraged me to study the Arabic language seriously. He also told me that I should not obey any thing unless I was convinced that it was right. He rebelled against the rule of the King and the British, was exiled to a small town in the Nile Delta, and the government punished him by not promoting him for ten years.

My mother rebelled in her own way against the rule of her father and her husband. Her punishment was marriage and the burden of nine children.

Both my father and my mother died young, and I had to carry the burden of a big family, since I was the eldest daughter. Life was not easy but I decided to survive and to look after my sisters and brothers. After my first marriage life became more difficult. I had to struggle against the authority of my husband, and his aggression. Like God he wanted me to obey, not to question anything he said or did. I struggled until I managed to get rid of him, although in Egypt it is not easy for a woman to divorce her husband. He can divorce her in a moment for no reason. My father stood by me and helped me to get a divorce, but shortly after he died and when I married again I had to fight on my own to get a divorce from my second husband. Since 1964 I have been married to my third husband, Sherif Hetata, who is also a medical doctor and a writer and we succeeded in building a family with a daughter and a son who are both creative.

The most painful struggles in my life were those I had to engage in against the government. It seems as though I inherited most of my genes from my father, my mother and from my paternal grandmother who was a poor illiterate peasant but was also a great woman. I cannot obey any boss without questioning, be he the head of state. So in 1972 I lost my post in the government. In 1981 I found myself in prison, and since 1988 on and off my name has been put on a Death list.

In 1991 the government closed down the association and the magazine which I had established, and in April 1982 and in 1999 the authorities accused me of illegal activities against the state because with other women I tried to establish the Union of Egyptian Women. More recently in the summer of 2001 I and my husband had to fight an attempt to divorce us on religious grounds. I was accused of apostasy because I declared that the kissing of the black stone in Mecca during pilgrimage is a vestige of paganism. According to an obscure old Islamic law called "Hisba" an apostate should not be married to a Muslim man who in this case was my husband.

I have managed throughout to resist and to survive despite all these conflicts, and despite moments of great sadness and despair. My husband, my children and my friends in Egypt and in many countries, have been a strong support.
Now I am resting a little, yet the future is obscure and very unpredictable especially in our region the so-called "Middle East" (Middle to who?). Every day we open our eyes in the morning to the massacre of the Palestinian people by the Israeli army. Every day we hear statements by the president of the USA which speak of war on people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Lybia, Cuba, Korea or any other country.

Unquestioning obedience is the rule enforced by the military super power seeking to dominate the world. But everywhere people are resisting. Everyday we hear of the demonstrations, in the West and in the East, in the North and in the South. Hundreds of thousands of women and men are rebelling despite bullets and gases, prisons and intimidation, and the violence of the sophisticated arms used against them.

During the last year I participated in demonstrations in London, in Washington D.C., in Barcelona, in Porto-Alegre, in Paris, in New York, in Cairo, and other cities.

This collective global and local resistance is increasing in power and scope day after day. It is the source of our hope in the future, the creative human effort of people who dream of a world where they can live in justice and freedom and peace.

Writing has helped me to fight against exile and alienation. Since my mother taught me how to write I started to keep a diary. One day my aunt came upon it by accident. I watched her turn the pages over, purse her lips as though ruminating over something. Next day I heard her say to my mother "This girl is strange "Zeinab". The word strange meant unnatural. A normal or a natural girl found pleasure in cooking not writing, and even if she wrote the first line had to be "In the name of Allah and His Prophet".

The word "strange" or "stranger" began to hunt me down wherever I went in my own country at first then later when I travelled abroad. Abroad it changed to become the English word "alien".

When I hear the word "alien" I put my hands over my ears to shut it out, for it is a very painful word, a word which deprives me of my human rights and dignity. It forces me to take the plane back to my country, for exile in one's home is less cruel than exile in a foreign country.

I was forced to leave Egypt when my name was put on a death list by a fundamentalist group probably linked to some government circles or foreign secret services. I spent a few months in Europe and a few years in the United States of America. There I taught as a visiting professor in different universities including four years in Duke university (from 1993 to 1997).

On the third of September 2001 I left Egypt again to teach at Montclair State University in New Jersey. On the 11th of September I saw the flames from my window after the planes hit the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

The atmosphere in the United States during the years I spent in Duke was very different to that which prevailed a few years later. A patriotic and religious frenzy has swept through the United States especially in the "Bible Belt" and the Southern States. The tone of G.W. Bush in his speeches and statements has grown more and more harsh. My Arabic accent and my Egyptian passport have made me an object of suspicion with the American authorities.

But the American people are not the American government, are not the people who exercise a monopoly of economic and military power over the country. They, like other peoples in the world, are submitted to the rule of force rather than the rule of real democracy or justice.

The first day I entered Duke university I was asked: "What would you like to teach?" I felt free to choose. I chose to teach a course which I named "Dissidence and Creativity". My feeling of exile, of being an "alien" disappeared every time I entered my class and looked in the eyes of my students. They reminded me of the eyes of young women and men at home, of the eyes of my daughter and son. They reminded me of the eyes I saw in the mirror when I was a medical student in Cairo university during the fifties, and when I was a post-graduate student in Columbia university in New York during the sixties.

The first time I travelled to the United States was in 1965. I joined the demonstrations against the war in Vietnam. I felt that the thousands of students marching through the streets with their banners, their balloons and their flowers were my people, my family, and that their struggle was mine. Our voices united into one powerful chorus of voices that demanded justice, freedom, peace and love for the world, into a mighty voice that broke through the barriers between countries, religions, races, languages and between the sexes, that abolished all divisions separating between classes and colours, and other forms of discrimination inherited from the slave system and still alive today.

It is the voice that wipes away the word exile, or alien, or stranger from my body and my memory.

It is the voice that inspires me when I write. I did not know the value of creative words until I went to prison in 1981. Every day the superintendent of the prison accompanied by guards would search my cell. They left no corner, no hole in the walls, or the ceiling, or the floor, or the toilet-bowl, without probing into it. When they had finished the superintendent would growl at me: "If we find a pen and paper in your cell that will be more dangerous for you than if we find a gun".

Since that moment I have never ceased writing. Writing has allowed me to reach people in my home country and in other countries of the world. It has torn down the walls of isolation that separated me from them, from myself and from my body, rid me of the feelings of alienation and exile no matter where I am.

Nawal El Saadawi
Cairo, Egypt, November 2002