Past Read: Walking Through Fire: A Life of Nawal El Saadawi

Saadawi, Nawal El. Walking Through Fire: A Life of Nawal El Saadawi. (London, Zed, 2006)

Nawal El-Saadawi’s memoir Walking Through Fire (2002) is a joy to read. Much like her novellas and short stories, it is structurally simple, a series of vignettes that combine to tell the story of her life. Also like the rest of her extraordinary life’s work, it is bound up in the physical experience of being a woman in Egypt; she describes her horror at discovering her first pregnancy, the result of her unions with a husband she had felt obliged to marry and to whom she felt little more than indifferent, and her attempt to self-abort the unwanted child by throwing herself off a balcony. When she asks her husband for a divorce, he responds that such things are entirely his prerogative by shariah law. As much as I enjoyed this simple read, at times it felt heavy-handed in ways that her Circling Song, Woman at Point Zero, and The Hidden Face of Eve did not; among the things that I have admired about El-Saadawi’s tireless activism is her frequent reiteration that men are raised and trained up with the burdens of Egyptian gender norms as well as women, and that by implication the fight to end gender oppression is not fought between men and women, but with both sexes joining sides against an oppressive tradition.