Annual International Conference
May 26-27 1999

Sherif Hetata

Breaking Down Barriers or, How Did My Experience Write Itself?

Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war there has been an increasing interest in matters related to religion amongst academic circles. Conferences on religion have become a frequent occurrence and I have attended quite a number. All of them without exception were about Islam. Each time I have asked the same question: Why when dealing with religion is there this emphasis on Islam? Why is it that the monotheistic religions like Christianity and Judaism receive little attention?

The revival of religion and the growth of fundamentalism which we have witnessed over the last quarter of a century is not limited to Islam. Nawal el Saadawi and I taught together at Duke University in North Carolina for four years and became familiar with the similar developments in American life, with the increasing strength and influence of the Christian fundamentalist movement, and of “Political Christianity”, with the growth of the Christian coalition, to a membership of over two million, its alliance with the Republican Party, its expansion into the economy into education and schools, into culture, and the media. We followed the pressures exerted by it to reintroduce prayer into schools and abolish the teaching of Darwin’s evolutionary theories, as well as the efforts made by various Christian movements to outlaw abortion, and close down abortion clinics often by violent means. We read about what has come to be known in the U.S.A. as the Bible belt.

I worked in India for a number of years. There too religious fundamentalism has developed rapidly over the last two decades amongst Moslems, Sikhs and Hindus, and today a Hindu fundamentalist party is in power.

In the region of the world where I live Moslem fundamentalism and political Islam have gained in strength. But across the border from Egypt the Jewish fundamentalist movement has become a prominent, and deciding force in Israeli life.

Everyday we can observe how similar to one another these movements are in the religious ideas and practices they propagate, in the rigid backwardness of their thought, in the way they act. So when you link Islam or any other religion to development in our era, to me this linkage is against the development of Africa even if in every religion we can find some wisdom, some human principles to be retained. For all religions are a part of human historical thought. But in religion you can also find discrimination based on class, and gender, and race that is discrimination in its most important forms.

In our era the growth of politically active religious movements and of religious fundamentalism is almost universal. But in the past years the concentration on Islam has often served the political aims of ruling circles in the West. In addition it tends to obscure the role played by the religious revival and by religious fundamentalism in our post-modern world, in maintaining and reinforcing the free market, and the political and economic system promoted by global multi-national capitalism.

* * * *

When I received an invitation from Kenneth King to attend this conference on "Islam and Development in Africa" I said to myself "Another conference on Islam, where I will repeat many of the things I have said before, even if each time I try to add some new details, or develop my thoughts". But then he said to me "We want you to talk before the conference to an audience composed of students and staff in the Centre for African Studies as well as some of the people who are attending the conference on a topic of your choice". So here I am ready to talk to you today about things far removed from Islam and Development, yet related to the life of a middle class physician and writer who comes from a country in North Africa called Egypt.

At the beginning when I sat down to write the paper which I was supposed to send to Kenneth King that is not what I had in mind. By my side I had placed some files and books. In front of me was a block note of white paper which I began to cover with notes about ethnicity and political structures in Africa eager to overcome the frightening void of blank pages staring at me. Several days went by in preparing notes then I started to write. After reaching half way through my paper, I suddenly stopped. I felt I was performing a duty without joy or pleasure, and when that feeling assails me when I am writing I know something is wrong. After many years I have learnt to let my inner feelings guide me. This is the result of a process of "deconstructing" gender which started in my life thirty five years ago when Nawal el Saadawi and I met and married. It is a breaking down of the patriarchal barrier which separates the body from the mind, and thought from emotion.

An irksome voice within me asked of what value will it be if you write another paper on ethnicity and political structures in Africa. May be the problem for me lies in the distance which has been created between scholarly thought and every day life, in the abstract way the scholastic system has taught us to think and write. How could I say something original, something of interest to the audience that would come to hear me in that far away centre in Scotland, something that reflected me and not someone else? Had not Kenneth King told me I could chose my topic?

I seized hold of the sheets of paper covered in handwriting, a sign of backwardness in this computer age which I must overcome, and dropped the pieces into the coloured wicket basket. Now I had no alternative other than to put aside the files and books I had poured into. Once more the blank white sheets of paper were staring at me. Once more I felt lost, unable to find my way. Here I was presuming to write a paper for an academic centre without quoting what someone else had said before. I felt alone, unarmed and weak, for after all I too had been brought up in a scholastic system where inverted commas, footnotes and references had rescued me from too much thinking, where the experience of ordinary human beings like me did not belong with knowledge, was not of value intellectually.

But despite the risk I knew I could be running with the scholars who would hear me or read me in the Centre for African Studies I decided to write this paper which I have called "Breaking Down Barriers" or "How Did My Experience Write Itself", leaving the choice of its title to those who would like to make use of it in one way or another.

* * * *

Born in 1923 of an Egyptian father and an English mother I lived the first five years of my life in London and the next two years in Rome. My father was well-off but my mother came from a family of limited means, taught me to face the rigors of English winters wearing just a cotton shirt, and the virtues of silence and of a Victorian discipline built on hard work. In Rome I went to school for a short while, lived in an atmosphere of greater warmth with a "nanny"[1] who drank wine, went out with her lover and played Neopolitan songs on our gramophone. The first pulsations of what may be called "artistic feeling" came to me from my rambling through Camden town, glimpses of a stream, flowing under trees, from the sadness of being silent and alone, from the streets and piazzas of Rome in the late twenties, from listening to opera, and Caruso. My mother told me that I had the hands of an artist but when I asked her to buy me a violin she said “Music does not feed the musician”.

When we arrived in Egypt I went to an English Protestant missionary school, studied with missionary zeal, won all the prizes, and the biblical approval of my teachers and my mother. As regards my father, a handsome playboy, not however devoid of a sense of responsibility, he was almost never at home to express his approval of my achievements. My behaviour was considered by all to be exemplary. But deep down inside there was still the sadness of being alone, a feeling of alienation, of being English, speaking English in an Egyptian society where people spoke Arabic, had a different culture, a different way of life, ways of socializing, jokes, laughter, escapades of which I was deprived. So I developed a secret life, listened to classical music locked up in my room, read English literature and classics, and kept a diary in English which no one has ever read, but which was my first attempt at writing, and reflected, perhaps, a desire to express myself in a world where the deepest part of that self was silenced, and had no chance to really talk.

One person, only one person kept the child alive in me, taught me to appreciate the beauty of small things and was my first introduction to the Arabic language. That person was my illiterate grandmother, the wife of feudal grandfather, and the daughter of a well-known family. She ruled over the numerous household composed of aunts, uncles, and a limited number of grandchildren.

I do not remember her well in the big mansion where we lived in Cairo until my dark eyed, black bearded, tall caftaned grandfather died shortly after we came back from Italy. But her small frail body, her sharp features, her quick spontaneous, sarcastic gurgles of laughter, and her moments of determined white anger came back to me whenever I think of the rambling village house with its courtyards, stores, kitchens, stables and guest house where I used to spend my holidays. There her presence is a living part of me. There I listen to her quiet voice as we walk hand in hand through the fruit garden, or sit on low stools in one of the courtyards to clean a small mound of rice with the dark robed women working in the household, or as I stand in the cow shed watching her milk a buffalo before giving me a small earthenware pot full of warm white foaming liquid, or lie under the mosquito net at night in a bed next to hers. I listen to her teaching me the names of things in Arabic, bringing them to life, moving them around, linking them to one another in a story, in that picturesque language, so full of images used by peasant women in our land. She made me look around at nature, appreciate its greenness, realize its beauty, respect the need to preserve it, to live in harmony with it with patience and in kindness. She nurtured a sense of art and imagery which lay hidden inside of me.

She died after I went to medical school. The fate of diligent students in Egypt was a medical career, so before she died she had time to be proud of me, made me sit beside her at table for all the males of our feudal family, now going bankrupt, were landowners, and police or army officers, with a penchant for the secret security police. This was the easiest career for those who were failures or mediocrities at school. However medical studies as taught according to the English system applied in our country was the antithesis of creative and artistic thinking. I had to imbibe a host of disconnected knowledge which divided the human being into mind and body, into diseased and healthy, into separate systems paving the way to greater separation through specialization, into male and female in which the male was dominant. and the female was dominated, became transformed into a reproductive system without a clitoris, without the right to know the meaning of pleasure, into men and women divorced from social conditions, classes and culture.

I graduated with honours, but meanwhile my discipline was breaking down, under the impact of new experiences in life, of suffering, of death, of a growing understanding of the human body and its complexity, but above all a beginning awareness of the interconnectedness of knowledge, that disease was not only a germ, but lack of sunlight, of fresh air, of food, a deprivation from the essential human needs in an unjust society. Disease and health started to become social, to be linked to society, rather than purely biological.

Thus, like many of the youth in my generation who studied or graduated during or immediately after the second World War I was drawn into politics, and politics at that time could not be separated from colonialism, from the national struggle against the British domination of Egypt and its feudal allies.

So I was drawn out of my silence into rebellion, into expression, into the next stage towards writing, for if we write we do so to express "dissidence" to express dissatisfaction with things as they are, and our desire to mould them into a reality which is more just, more free, more beautiful. We write for freedom, justice, beauty and pleasure. A revolutionary politician could not remain silent.. He had to speak, to write, to shout, to sing, and for me all this had to be done in Arabic. Politics, after my grandmother, made me regain what was necessarily my language, and together with an Arabic examination I had to pass during medical college gave back to me a heritage which I might have lost.

So, I learnt Arabic in the field as you might say, through an ardent desire to express myself, to be in the struggle. I learnt it through practice and so my language has remained to this day, simple, direct, devoid of academic complexity and mystification, has remained driven by a passion, an involvement, a desire to communicate, to understand, to be understood, to build up human solidarity rather than discriminate, or speak from above to those who stand below.

From national politics I moved into Marxism for in my generation Marxism seemed the only social political movement in Egypt which had something new to say. Through Marxism I made new connections between theory and practice, between matter and ideas, between economics and politics, between the struggle and classes. But Marxism ceased at a certain moment to develop my thinking, and therefore my writing, because for me as for many others it became a dogma, rather than one of the ways of thinking, even although I still feel that what I learnt from it helped me to see life in a more comprehensive and interconnected way.

Politics and Marxism led me to prison, to fifteen years of prison sometimes into solitary confinement. It was an experience from which I learnt, but it strengthened my childhood leaning towards silence, so that when I came out of prison I had almost lost the capacity to talk. Everything remained bottled up inside as though encased in a plaster mould which had broken down partially for a period of time only to seal up again. In addition years of left wing politics had taught me to think in terms of masses, or classes, or tactics and strategy, had taught me to rationalize and explain rather than feel and express what I felt, or deal with the concrete manifestations of everyday human life, with the thoughts, and cares and actions of individuals and groups. Politics as we practised it, and as it continues to be practised had desiccated, dried up the well of art.

* * * *

That morning of the sixth day of November 1963 I climbed up the narrow winding steps behind the policeman who had opened the door to let me out of the foul, suffocating underground jail of Kasr al Nil packed to over flowing with criminals, pimps, drug peddlars, beggars, drunks and thieves standing or squatting on the cement floor with a pail of water for drinking, and a pail full of excreta for excreting placed side by side near the wall. I had been kept in this room for three nights and two days as a farewell send off after fifteen years in jail.

I walked through the sunlit streets of what was a beautiful green Garden City covered with gleaming drops of early morning dew, unable to take in the reality of being free, of an open blue sky, and rustling trees, of children on their way to school, as though after so many years in a cell I had lost the ability to feel.

I was twenty five years old that summer night when yuzbashi[2] Mamdouh Salem, Prime Minister many years later under Sadat, closed the cell door on me in the Alexandria city jail called Hadra Prison, forty years old when hand cuffed and closely guarded I rode the train from Mahareek[3] Prison in the southernmost part of the western desert, on a thousand kilometre journey before being released at the end of a hard labor sentence from Cairo Prison.

Three months later I was given a job in the Ministry of Health and found myself sitting in a room next to the latrines. The room was like a cell, and the latrines had a familiar smell so at the beginning I did not feel that much had changed.

There were five desks in the room, and we were five people, one

behind each desk, trying not to look at one other. Mine was the smallest and the oldest with a cracked top that lodged splinters in my flesh. The faces that were there, or walked in through the door seemed all the same, their features moulded into a wan submission.

All except hers. She sat at a desk opposite the door, a halo of silvery hair, two intense black eyes, and a face alive with the movement of her soul.

She belonged to another world and so did I. They said she had been married twice, had divorced twice and wrote stories about things that a woman should keep hidden. They said I was a dangerous, scheming rebel. We looked at one another, talked, held hands in a casino by the river, swam in the sea, made love and one year later we were married.

* * * *

My mother's face looks down on me from her picture on the wall. Her look is deep, her nose is straight, her forehead high, her face full of sadness, full of strength. I never knew what it meant for her to be a woman, never knew who she really was until years after I walked behind her coffin, until that moment when I realized that she had gone forever.

She and I were never close. Something came between us. Born of an English family, she taught me discipline and hard work, never put her arms around me. So I became a serious youth, lacked a spontaneous warmth and rarely laughed. From an early age I put a shell around myself.

But mother was no ordinary woman and I owe a lot to her. I never told her that and now it is too late.

When she reached the age of fifty six my father married another woman. So she looked for a job and found one as an English teacher. In our family, because of her, work was considered important for every one, male or female, and equality between the sexes was looked upon as natural. So for me the problem of gender did not arise until I met that woman with the silver hair, and two black eyes and we started to live together.

* * * *

Her name was Nawal el Saadawi. She was a doctor, a writer and a mother with one daughter who was seven years old. These facts hovered at the margin of my conscious being. What mattered, what occupied my mind was the woman, her love, her warmth, her unending enthusiasm, like a breath of life going through my tired body.

I was lean and brown, burnt by the desert sun, more silent than ever. I had had only few relations with women. They had been occasions for romance or sexual pleasure, snatched either before or in between periods of hiding, exile and extended prison.

Like her I had gone to medical college and become a practising physician. I belonged to one of the oldest patriarchal professions. In it the mind and the body remained separate worlds, and there was no room for women except as nurses, or as assistants to highly autocratic male doctors and professors. Women were known to us as gynecology and obstetrics, in other words as a female reproductive apparatus with the clitoris missing, and always ignored as an organ, because sexual pleasure in females is related to the devil. Psychic disorders in women were treated by doctors applying their male knowledge which at its worst reflected a concealed antagonism, and at its best smacked of kindly paternalism.

Now when I remember the faces of the women we used to examine I wish I had not been there when it happened.

* * * *

In one of the drawers of my house in the village I came upon an old photograph of myself after I graduated from medical college. The face that looked out at me was grim, with a frown and a faraway look in the eyes as though I had taken an important decision.

1 was twenty three when I decided the boundaries of the medical profession were too narrow, plunged into the turbulent after World War 2 of political struggles, and started to pour into Marxist books trying to discover another way of being. Among them were books which said that women were oppressed not only because of class, and race, and religion but also because they were women. Engels had written "The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State" showing how these institutions had developed, and how they had led to the oppression of women. The Manifesto issued by the First International described how women were sold in the marriage market to the highest bidder, and how prostitution was an outlet for men to have extra marital sex, and yet maintain the family unit as one of the corner stones that kept bourgeois society going.

These books about women's oppression were important, but the Egyptian left wing movement in which I was involved paid no attention to them. Women were just a part of the anticolonialist struggle, and matters ended there, with perhaps a few words about their right to work, maternity leave, crèches and other things like that. Gender relations never entered the arena of political struggle. The personal, and with it the family, and relations between men and women remained a private matter. The personal was divorced from the political, from the public, and the result was that both continued to be dominated by patriarchal thought. Politics were left to be ruled by a minority of men with power and money, and the few, the very few women who got in were chosen by men with authority, were subordinated to them, made to fulfil subsidiary tasks, to be auxiliaries who operate

within the framework of an ideology and a political agenda defined by groups of men to serve the interests and the aims of the system which continues to oppress women.

* * * *

When I met Nawal El Saadawi this was my political baggage. In addition for fifteen years I had lived only with men, with political prisoners, criminals and jailers. My world was that of clandestine struggle, where thoughts and emotions were often bottled up inside. The soil in which words and feelings could grow, break through, express themselves had become dry. Revolution had been transformed into an abstract world of categories and calculations where the individual human being, the self, no longer mattered. Women: wives, lovers, sisters, mothers flared up in the imagination at moments of stress, or desire only to fall back into the deep recesses of a semi-forgetfulness.

Perhaps I was better prepared than most men for a different phase in my life. My mother had taught me respect for women. I had always been on the move, had taken risks, was accustomed to change . Nawal and I were equal partners. That was a tacit agreement to which it seemed that nothing need be added.

I did not know that to marry a woman who was really serious about the rights of women was not as simple as all that, nor did I realize that gender is embedded in every aspect of our lives, in the deepest recesses of our hearts and minds, and bodies.

* * * *

In those days I had not heard the word "feminist" and in any case even if I had, it would not have meant very much to me.

I soon discovered that for Nawal it meant not giving up her rights even in the smallest of matters. At first I could not understand, but as the years went by I realized that the path of small concessions has been for many a woman a way to lose her rights.

Our first struggles were over trivial things, like how to divide up the domestic chores between us. It took some time before we settled down to a just and flexible way of handling them. If Nawal was working, or writing I cooked. When I went to a meeting she washed up. We arranged to clean the house in turn. When the children were small and still needed daily care one of us would stay at home if the other had work to do, or travelled, or lived abroad for a period of time, or was sent to prison. As a family we took all decisions together, consulted our daughter and our son even when they were still quite young. It was always useful and sometimes funny. At one time Nawal and I were thinking of having another child so we asked them to tell us what they thought. My son who was five years old pondered the question for a while before saying: "On condition it won't be a boy or else when I grow up I'll be taken to the army".

At the same time I began to meet many of the women with whom Nawal was cooperating, to attend their meetings, to read the books on women she brought home. Sometimes I wrote a paper, or took part in discussions, but most of the time I listened.

Now I was talking a lot with Nawal and sometimes with the other women. Gradually what may be called the "feminine part" in me was coming out. I became interested in what were considered the "smaller" things in life, delved deeper into myself, brought out what was hidden. My dialogue with Nawal has never stopped since we married.

* * * *

When Nawal and I started to live together she was already a well-known writer. I had been through all sorts of experiences which I thought she could make use of as raw material for one or two of her stories.

So one evening we sat down on opposite sides of a table. In front of her she put a small ream of the cheap slightly grayish paper she was fond of writing on. In front of me I put some notes, a small recorder and two spare tapes. I started to tell her my story, and for more than sixty nights we sat down like that, with me talking, the recorder turning and her pen racing over the sheets of paper.

The time flew past as though the nights were rolling. Then one night she said she had enough material. Next day she started writing.

Three months went by and one morning. I saw her collect her papers and put them in an orange folder with an elastic band at each corner. That night she handed me the folder and said "I've finished the novel and I want you to read it".

It was close on dawn when I finished reading. The novel was called "El Ghaib" which means "Missing". Years later it was translated into English and published under the title "Searching". I liked the novel but felt a tinge of disappointment. There was nothing in it related to the things I had told her. When I asked her why she said I can only write about what is related to my own experiences. Only you can write the stories you told me.

I said: "But I do not think I can do that".

"Have you ever tried writing a novel before". She asked

"No never". I answered

"Then how can you tell if you've never tried to do it ?”

"I'm sure I can't. I don't have a gift for that kind of writing".

"I think you're wrong. The way you told me your story made me feel you have the talent, that you are creative".

I did not take what she had said to me seriously. But she kept asking me. "'Have you started writing"? To which I answered "No you're not really serious are you"? "Of course I am" was her reply.

So one day out of curiosity I sat down and wrote a few pages. But when I read them I felt they were awful, tore them up quickly and threw them into the waste paper basket.

A few days later she asked me "What have you done with your writing"? "Nothing", I said "Believe me you can do it", she said.

A month went by, then late one summer night as I sat listening to the city quietly breathing, I got up, sat down at my desk and pulled out a pen and some paper. Two years later I finished my first novel. It was called "The Eye With An Iron Lid" and was drawn from my prison experience. Since then I have written five novels, two travelogues and an auto biography of over a thousand pages. I do not believe that a man can write an autobiography, can write with courage about himself if he has not broken through his male gender shell.

In all my writing women play an important role as subjects, and that is something distinctive about them. My auto-biography is called "Al Nawafiz Al

Maftouha" which means. "Open Windows" and in it my relationship with Nawal, the love and friendship we have lived together occupies a special place.

* * * *

Every one has a treasure

Very often when I ask people why they do not write down some of the things they talk to me about in their lives their answer is "There is nothing in my life worth writing about, or that would be of interest to others". When they say that I tell them about my experience, how I might have ended up by not writing the things I wrote if I had not met Nawal.

I think that the experience writes itself to the degree that we have confidence in this experience, in its value, in its significance. And that is what most people do not feel, and do not believe. If one does not believe that one has something worthwhile to say, one will never write anything. And when I listen to people I feel that in every life there is a treasure of experience, of doubts, of struggles, of feelings, of events, of impressions, of failures and successes which is forgotten, never sees the light.

It is forgotten because we are busy with other things, with the commotion and noise of everyday life, with the present. We have no time to remember. We do not give ourselves enough time to remember. The tempo, the characteristics of modern, or "post modern" life takes people away from reflection. involve them in running from one place to the other, from television., to football. to entertainment, to the money market. to sex, to whatever. It keeps us moving on the surface, on the outer layers.

Writing is memory, and imagination is an extension of reality and therefore of memory. But to remember we need time and distance. Time to plunge into the depths that have been forgotten and recall them, to go deeper and deeper peeling off one layer to discover another, remembering one thing which leads to another, unraveling the complex, and linking together, deconstructing and constructing. Distance to avoid the disturbances, the vibrations. the interferences of the present.

My experience in writing is that I write best when I am alone, in a distant place, with silence and calm and natural beauty around me, when I am thinking of nothing else. The experience of writing is total concentration, is devotion.

Experience writes itself by believing in and discovering the forgotten treasures in one's life.

And when it goes well, how thrilling, how beautiful, and how revealing is this experience.

But to write the experience truthfully one must struggle against becoming a player, against becoming expert at using tools in order to sell or to dazzle.

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[1] Half cook, half governess.

[2] Captain

[3] literally “Incinerator Prison due to the burning desert heat.