Nawal El Saadawi has died
On march 21, we lost the most renowned of women thinkers and writers in the twentieth century, Nawal El Saadawi. She passed away at the age of 89 in Egypt, her native country.
March 22, 2021
EGIPTO
The most notable of Egyptian women thinkers in the twentieth century, Nawal el Saadawi, passed away on March 21, 2021 at the age of 89. A psychiatrist by profession, she was a pioneering feminist and writer who spent decades sharing her viewpoints and personal story through novels, essays, autobiographies and numerous talks.
Among these, she took part in a colloquium held at Casa Árabe in 2016, with the title “Feminisms in the Arab World,” alongside the Algerian specialist in gender issues, Wassyla Tamzali, and two Spanish professors, Nieves Paradela and Eva Lapiedra. During this round table discussion, they addressed the complex situation which women endure in today’s Arab societies and the struggle for their rights.
Born in a village on the outskirts of Cairo in 1931, she was the second of nine children. Her father was a civil servant, whereas her mother had been born into the bourgeoisie. One of the childhood experiences that El Saadawi documented with troubling clarity was female genital mutilation, which she campaigned against throughout her life, arguing that it was a tool used to oppress women. Female genital mutilation was banned in Egypt in 2008, but El Saadawi denounced its ongoing existence today.
In 1981, El Saadawi was arrested under Anwar Sadat’s presidency as part of a raid against dissidents and was imprisoned for three months. In jail she wrote her memoirs on toilet paper, using an eyebrow pencil. After Sadat’s death, she was freed, but her work was censored and her books were banned. Her most notable works translated into Spanish are La cara desnuda de la mujer árabe (The Naked Face of Arab Women), Mujer en punto cero (Woman at Point Zero) and La cara oculta de Eva (The Hidden Face of Eve).
Her work does not avoid controversial issues such as ablation of the clitoris, use of the veil, abortion and women’s empowerment, as well as raising anti-neocolonial issues. Despite also having been subject to criticism, she was bestowed with numerous honorary degrees from universities around the world and, in 2020, Time magazine named her one of the 100 women of the year, featuring her on the cover of one issue. “I will die, and you will die. The important thing is how you live until you die,” the author’s Twitter account read on the day of her death.