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Review: Intentions and Realisation in the Narratives of Nawal El-Saadawi Reviewed Work(s): Memoirs of a Woman Doctor by Nawal El-Saadawi and Catherine Cobham; The Fall of the Imam by Nawal El-Saadawi and Sherif Hetata; Woman against Her Sex: A Critique of Nawal El-Saadawi by Georges Tarabishi, Basil Hatim and Elisabeth Orsini Review by: Sabry Hafez Source: Third World Quarterly, Vol. 11, No. 3 (Jul., 1989), pp. 188-198 Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3992625 Accessed: 24-03-2019 10:36 UTC

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LITERAR Y FEA TURE REVIEWS

Intentions and realisation in the narratives of Nawal El-Saadawi

Sabry Hafez

Memoirs of a Woman Doctor

Nawal El-Saadawi

Translated from the Arabic by Catherine Cobham

London: Saqi Books. 1988. 101pp. ?9.95hb/?3.50pb

The Fall of the Imam

Nawal El-Saadawi Translated from the Arabic by Sherif Hetata

London: Methuen. 1988. 175pp. ?10.95hb

Woman Against Her Sex: a critique of Nawal El-Saadawi

Georges Tarabishi (with a reply by Nawal El-Saadawi) Translated from the Arabic by Basil Hatim and Elisabeth Orsini

London: Saqi Books. 1988. 232pp. ?20.00hb/f8.95pb

Nawal El-Saadawi's crusade for the liberation of Arab women has earned her

a great deal of fame in the West as the major Arab feminist without having had a significant impact on her standing within the context of Arab culture at

large and Arabic literature in particular. As a novelist, Saadawi is by no means

the best female Arab writer. Latifa Al-Zayyat, Radwa Ashur and Salwa Bakr

in Egypt; Layla Ba'albaki, Emeli Nasralla and Hanan Al-Shaykh in Lebanon;

Collet Khuri and Ghada Al-Samman in Syria; Samira Azzam and Sahar Kha- lifa in Palestine are more competent novelists. Some of these writers, par-

ticularly the Egyptian ones, even share Saadawi's political views and her stand

vis-a'-vis the struggle for women's rights. Indeed, all three Egyptian writers

mentioned here suffered political persecution and imprisonment under Presi-

dent Anwar Sadat. Zayyat, whose first novel, Al-bab al-Maftuh (The Open

Door, 1956) is widely considered to be one of the landmarks of Egyptian

fiction, was imprisoned more than once because she played an active and

extremely effective role in the cultural and political life of Egypt. Her creative writing is far more influential than that of Saadawi, for it has played a positive role not only in changing the social and political views of readers-male and

female alike-but also in transforming literary sensibility and narrative tech-

niques.

188 TWQ 11(3) July 1989/ISSN 0143-6597/89. $1.25

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NAWAL EL-SAADAWI

Yet, Zayyat's work, as well as that of the other Egyptian writers, is neither

translated nor known in the West, a fact that raises the question: why has

Saadawi attained more fame in the West than any of them? Is it only because

she portrays the predicament of Arab women? Yet, all these writers address,

in a more profound manner, the same issue. Why is there a gap between

her standing in the West and that in her own culture? Is it because her writ-

ing is simpler and appeals to a wider public? Or is it because there is some-

thing in her writing that makes it appeal more to the Western reader than to

the Arab? Do her views tell the Western reader what he or she wants to hear about the nature of the treatment of women in a Muslim culture? Has she

attained her fame because she vindicates the main tenets of the traditional orientalist discourse on the position of women in Arab society, and confirms

many of the prevalent stereotypes about Arab women and men?

Whatever the answers to these questions may be, the fact remains that there

is a wide gap between Saadawi's standing in the West and in her own Arab

culture, and that her success in the West cannot be attributed to the quality of

her work alone. The translation of two of her narrative works-I hesitate to

call them novels-into English in one year is indicative of her success in the

West, or at least of the success of feminist solidarity in influencing both the

reading public and the publishing trade. But the persistence of the same issues

and shortcomings in two works written thirty years apart suggests a lack of artistic and intellectual development over that period. It may also suggest a

certain disregard for the intelligence of the reader at home, for whom she has been labouring the same issues over and over again, without ever stopping to

ponder the reasons for the ineffectiveness of her endeavour. Perhaps a change of tactics is overdue, since the old tactics have failed to effect the required

socio-political change. Even a modification of her major strategies would be desirable, in order to achieve her goals and elicit a positive response from her

readers at home, a response necessary for bringing about the much-needed

change. But, is she interested in the reader at home? I wonder. For I detect in

her writing, in Arabic, that she is more interested in the Western than in the Arab reader. This interest motivates the narratives and leads her to state, even in her Arabic texts, facts that run counter to reality but have an appeal to the Western reader. An example of this practice is the reference to her heroine changing her name after marriage in Memoirs of a Woman Doctor (p 62), which is an issue for Western feminists but is completely false as far as Egyptian women are concerned; in Egypt, women do not change their maiden names after marriage and it requires a lengthy legal procedure if they wish to do so.

Memoirs of a Woman Doctor, sensitively translated by Catherine Cobham, tells the life story of an Egyptian girl's resentment of her being female, and her quest for recognition in the world of men as an equal. Her achievements in school, at the Faculty of Medicine, and later as a working doctor are portrayed

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as being a direct result of her suppression of her own sexuality. Her first

marriage, in which she was sought as a mother-figure rather than as a wife and companion, collapsed. After working closely with nature in the countryside,

and with underprivileged peasants and victims of rape, the heroine meets a musician who appears in the text as a magical figure. She falls in love with him

at first sight, and the happy ending shows us the militant heroine melting in

his arms and expressing her affection by baking him a cake and cleaning the

flat. 'He held me close and embraced me until all my being melted into his'

(p 97). The happy ending sees the taming of the shrew, the transformation of a

confused woman into a more traditional one who falls head over heels in love as soon as she meets the right man who is capable of penetrating the skin-deep

feminism to reveal the traditional woman underneath, ready to shed her tears

and seek his protection:

I hid my face against his chest, seeking his protection, clinging to him. I felt as if I had

been stripped of my past life and had gone back to being a child learning to walk. I'd

begun to need a hand to support me. For the first time in my life I felt that I needed

someone else, something I hadn't felt even about my mother. I buried my head in his

chest and wept tears of quiet relief. (pp 100-1)

Reading this happy ending one cannot help asking: what was all the fuss

about? Does the solution of an individual's problem eradicate the social

ones? Has love the magic touch capable of dissipating deeply rooted social attitudes?

Reading the book as a rudimentary autobiography enables the reader to

accept its naivety and to sympathise with its artless, unsophisticated heroine in

her struggle to come to terms with her own sexuality. It also diminishes the

reader's demand for a balanced portrayal of a young woman at loggerheads

both with her own femininity and with the prevalent perception of the female

in her immediate surroundings. In these terms, the book's subjectivity is

accepted as an inherent part of a true record of the author's controversial and

often problematic struggle to reverse the scale of social perceptions of male

and female roles and standings. The contradictions of the text, and the subjec- tive exaggerations in its depiction of social ills and the double standard of

morality, can be tolerated as merely autobiographical. Indeed, the only justifica-

tion of the book's predominantly monophonic narrative is its autobiographical

nature that assumes an overtly subjective view of the world. But the author

denies its autobiographical nature and demands that we treat it as a novel, a

test that is difficult to withstand.

In her reply to Tarabishi (dated London, April 1987), Saadawi takes him to task for pointing out the autobiographical nature of the book: 'If I have chosen

the character of a woman doctor in Memoirs of a Woman Doctor, this in no

way means that the woman doctor is Nawal El-Saadawi' (p 190). Yet, two months later in her prefatory author's note to the book (dated London, June

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1987) she stated that, 'it expressed my feelings and experiences as a woman

who was a doctor at work, but still performed the role of a wife and a mother at home' (p 7). Saadawi seems to be confusing the autobiographical with auto- biography without much awareness of the contradictory nature of her state- ments. Memoirs of a Woman Doctor appears to be a clearly autobiographical work, if not an autobiography. She wrote it in 1957 when she was in her

twenties and had nothing but her own experience to draw upon. But more important, narrative strategies in this text suggest a complete identification

between the voice of the narrator (the unnamed heroine) and that of the author. The majority of first novels in Arabic literature are strongly autobiographical, and in this tradition, the author tends to be thinly disguised behind an

unnamed hero, the text always being narrated in the first person. Memoirs of a Woman Doctor resorts to both these devices, and draws heavily upon the life

of its author.

Treating the text as a novel exerts taxing literary demands. The reader's

expectations are enhanced by relating it to a different set of conventions, and all measures of leniency associated with the reception of autobiographical

narrative are precluded. As a fictional character, the unnamed heroine of

Memoirs of a Woman Doctor invokes in its reader more ridicule than sym- pathy or understanding. Her pathetic quest for a complete suppression of her femininity leads her to twist facts and exhibit attitudes as bigoted and

unacceptable as those of her male enemies, against whose attitudes she wages her holy war. Her racist views of the black man who works as the porter of their apartment building (the English translation moderates this by twice omit- ting the word 'black') are as piteous as those of the males who treat her as a sex object. Her childish behaviour and bookish crusade against her own sexual- ity is treated as an ideological battle, but the character itself is neither ideologi-

cally authoritative, nor independent from its own author. The heroine cannot be perceived as an original character with fully weighted ideological concep- tions of her own, and with internal motivations that convince the reader of the originality of her ideas or of their being rooted in a complex social reality. She is rather a mere vehicle of the author's views, and is unable to disentangle herself from these views, even when they run counter to the logic of narrated events.

Assuming, with Saadawi, that the heroine is different from the author, we can endeavour to investigate the relationship of the two. The heroine interests her not as some manifestation of reality that possesses specific socially typical or individually characteristic traits, nor as a specific profile assembled out of unambiguous and objective features which, taken together, forge the identity of that particular heroine. The heroine interests her as a particular and rigidly static point of view on a world that is dogmatically perceived as inimical, and is cancelled out from the text to avoid any tiresome interaction with its various forces. The text, therefore, is not interested in the degree to which the heroine

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is sociologically typical, nor in how she appears to the world or even how the world appears to her, but rather in how she appears to herself. Such a view of

the heroine demands a richly introspective character and a sophisticated method of discovery. Instead we are faced with a one-dimensional character

who is uninterested in anything but her own quest to attain recognition on

purely masculine terms, despite the fact that her ideological views dictate a multi-dimensional portrayal of social reality which is in short supply in the text.

The heroine aspires to play God, the all-knowing and almighty, but neither the compassionate nor the merciful, a God with a narrow field of intellectual vision who gets angry very easily and strikes down characters with a stroke of

the pen. After all, most characters are of the cardboard variety, and the first-

person narrative makes them easy to knock down. The heroine who dispenses with characters so easily becomes confused with the author, for the heavy authorial presence is one of the general characteristics of Saadawi's narrative, and this is not in any way helped by her desire to play God on both the social and narrative plains. The clearly detectable presence of the omniscient author usually mars first-person narrative, purges it of its introspective nature and sheds doubt on its usefulness as a narrative strategy.

This presence is as evident in Memoirs of a Woman Doctor as it is in The

Fall of the Imam, whose narrative structure, though different, is still dependent on first-person narrative techniques. The structure of The Fall of the Imam could have allowed Saadawi to create her own version of polyphonic narrative, capable of elaborating highly complex ideological issues. She allows her differ- ent characters to speak in turn, giving us their own versions of certain aspects of the story. But alas, they all speak with a unified language, the language of the author and not that of the character, which takes into account neither their different socio-psychological backgrounds, nor their opposing ideological stances. What unfolds in the book is not a multitude of characters and fates in

a single objective world, illuminated by a single objective consciousness, but rather a group of fragmentary characters who are objects of authorial dis-

course, and not, despite their first-person narrative, subjects of their own directly signifying discourse. This fact calls into question the motivation of the device, and the logic of using such a demanding technique for a task than can be achieved by resorting to the usual functions of characterisation and plot de- velopment.

The Fall of the Imam is the story of an illegitimate woman who discovers that her real father is the Imam, a political leader who exploits religion for his own ends. His despotic nature and fanatical views are portrayed as a product of an inferiority complex, for the Imam is not only obnoxiously vulgar, ugly, cruel and stupid, but he is also from a low and poor background. The author seems to be equating poverty with immorality and wealth with good manners and solid ethical values, a position that is even incompatible with many of her

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own ideological views. In spite of all his weaknesses and repulsive dispositions,

the Imam has miraculously managed to attain power and employ a group of

people who are more intelligent and more highly educated than himself, and

who come from better backgrounds, to help him run a highly corrupt state

apparatus. The text is reticent when it comes to explaining how he has suc-

ceeded in accomplishing this, and in achieving, in addition, a personality cult

that enables his corrupt and universally hated regime to survive after his

death.

As for the Imam's illegitimate daughter, who is presented as a female version

of Christ, she is as unintelligible as her father. Although her father is a false

God, her mother no Virgin Mary and she no saviour, the text insists on calling

her Bint Allah (literally the daughter of God), and endows her mother, who is

a combination of a prostitute and a belly dancer, with martyrdom. Here is a

clear example of the wide gulf between the author's intentions and their nar-

rative realisation. It is indeed a sound feminist idea to invert the story of

Christ and posit the heroine as a modern female version. It is also viable to

sublimate abused and prostituted women to exalted martyrdom. But to bring

this from the realm of vague intentions into real narrative, capable of imparting

a symbolic layer of meaning, requires a poetically creative and competent pres-

entation, rather than the crude and obtrusive treatment of the heroine in The Fall of the Imam. Although the very orientation of the narrative makes hers

the prevalent voice in the text, she fails to articulate the motivations for her war against the Imam, whose recognition she neither seeks nor respects. She

appears, therefore, to be swimming in waters that are too shallow. Here again, one sees another example of how Saadawi lays her hands on a goldmine but

fails to emerge with any ore. Setting the daughter against her father and making her a major threat to his corrupt establishment could have been a potentially

devastating blow to the conception of patriarchy. But to enable such an idea to come to fruition requires a very sensitive treatment and a profoundly elabor-

ate process of education sentimentale, of which there is not a trace in The Fall of the Imam. The heroine's cultural background and the circumstances of her upbringing do not prepare her for an active political role, yet her crusade against the Imam acquires certain political resonance though it is based only on vengeance. The political and ideological resonance of her campaign against the Imam is surgically implanted and we are asked to accept it as natural. Her feelings towards, and views of, her father lack the complexity of the love-hate relationship which might be expected in such a situation. One may surmise that the author's antipathy towards the Imam, and all male characters, is designed to help her horoine justify her behaviour towards them. The text has many obnoxious men, and a few less obnoxious women, but there is little interaction between them, for the author seems to hope that by the mere cumulative effect of the juxtaposition of chapters in which her characters speak in turn, she can create the desired unity.

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The book is an attempt to write an allegorical satire based on the life and

tribulations of the late President Anwar Sadat, which is marred by ostensibly sarcastic, but clearly vindictive motives. One month before his assassination in 1981, whose detailed description is repeatedly portrayed in the book, Sadat was responsible for the detention of more than 1,500 Egyptian intellectuals and politicians (Saadawi amongst them), who were released by his successor, Presi- dent Mubarak, after his assassination. Many Egyptian writers, indeed the majo- rity of them, have experienced various forms of oppression by the state, includ- ing imprisonment for longer periods than that of Saadawi, but only a few have allowed their personal vendetta to affect their writing in the way Saadawi has done. The personal suffering of intellectuals should not blur their vision or impair their judgement. The writer's responsibility, and particularly those with an honourable cause such as Saadawi's, is far greater than a personal ven- detta.

We are not dealing in The Fall of the Imam with political statements but with a novel. If it were a political statement on the errors of Sadat, whose policies had, and continue to have, a disastrous effect on Egypt and the Arab world, I would wholeheartedly have supported Saadawi, and praised her cour- age. If it were a treatise on the narrow-mindedness of Muslim fundamentalists, their plunder of Islam and their aberrational-often apocryphal-interpreta- tion of its tenets, I would have upheld her argument and reinforced her rational stance. But it is a novel, and it is one thing to write a strong article attacking the fanatical policies of Sadat, Numeiri or Khomeini, and another to write a

novel whose main character, the Imam, is based on those three leaders put together, in order to ridicule the patriarchal system and expose the contradic- tions inherent in the mechanics of oppression and exploitation of religious dogma. Indeed, writing a successful novel about these issues would be of greater importance and would have more lasting impact than treating them in an article, for a novel is capable of particularising the abstract and solidifying the argument by offering it a palpable form. It can also provide the reader with an insight into the dynamics of the process that generates such political conditions or ideological thinking. But the emphasis here is on a 'successful' novel; as is suggested by Marshall McLuhan's proposition that 'the medium is the message', bad novels do not make sound political statements, with all the good intentions in the world.

The author's dedication of the novel, and her preface, attempt to suggest to the reader how to receive its events, and hint at both its political and feminist interpretation. Indeed, Doris Lessing in her comments on the dust jacket re- sponds to these pointers and declares it 'a tale of women suffering under harsh Islamic rule', pointing out both its feminist posture and anti-Islamic stance. But the novel has an equally political message that can reach its Arab reader more easily than its Western one. This is so because the Arab reader would identify the shadow of Sadat and his half-English second wife behind

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the murky figure of the Imam and his first lady. Many details of the Imam's

life and his physical description-from his stammer to 'the patch of dark scaly

skin like a mulberry' (p 96) on his forehead-are clear allusions to Sadat.

Other characters-the leader of the opposition, the great writer, the bodyguard

and the belly dancer, Gawaher-can easily be identified by an Arab reader as

real public figures in the political and artistic life of Egypt. Furthermore, some of the events in the text are rumours circulating in Egypt, and its central event is

a literal description of the assassination of Sadat. Yet, despite its reference to outside events and personalities, The Fall of the

Imam is not a realistic novel portraying the socio-political life of Egypt under

the autocratic rule of Sadat, but rather an attempt to use this material to

advance certain ideological statements concerning the position of women in Third World countries, and the hypocritical exploitation of religion by the

state. To achieve its aim the text does not refrain from resorting to generalisa-

tions or twisting facts, including universally known ones, such as its twist of

the frame story of The Arabian Nights to serve its ideological purpose (p 59).

Unlike Saadawi's one-dimensional characterisation, the frame story of The

Arabian Nights, with its rich interplay with the enframed stories, does not

depict Shahryar as a despicable villain intent on destroying women for no apparent reason, as Saadawi makes him appear, but as a wronged husband

who has been outraged by the infidelity of his wife. In his outrage he loses confidence in all women and decides to marry a new virgin every night and

send her to her death the following morning until Shahrazad, through the rubrics of elaborate narrative, educates him into abandoning his ruthless con-

duct. This elaborate process of re-education, in which Shahrazad uses the

power of narrative to dispel death and buy the valuable time necessary for changing the erroneous views of her husband, is reduced in Saadawi's inter- pretation, and her deliberate misrepresentation of the frame story, to a dem-

onstration of mere masculine folly and men's double standards of morality.

The Fall of the Imam is a political allegory consisting of thinly disguised characters who have no symbolic value. This is so because most characters derive their credibility neither from apt characterisation, nor from the internal cohesion of the plot, but rather from their reference to real figures in Egypt. The fictional world of the book strives for plausibility, and derives it from its constant reference to extrinsic data. For those who cannot relate its events or characters to their historical background, the book appears as an ambiguous fantasy, full of repetition, and marked by the burdensome authorial presence which engenders cardboard characters, males and females alike, and generates a heavy sense of didacticism. The ambiguity is not of the artistic type that imparts semantic richness and endows a work with various hermeneutic pos- sibilities, but is born out of confusion. Although the author speaks for all her characters, she seems out of sympathy with all of them bar one. On a purely artistic level, the book raises a number of crucial questions: Is it possible to

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write a novel without an iota of sympathy for, or understanding of, its main

characters? Can a vendetta motivate plausible narrative? Or do the blinding

qualities of vengeance rid the narrative of any sense of credibility? As in Memoirs of a Woman Doctor, all men in The Fall of the Imam are

bigoted, cruel, stupid, misogynists, perpetrators of crime, and above all,

sexually impotent. Although the English translation of The Fall of the Imam is

in many ways better than the original Arabic text which is plagued with many

grammatical errors and stylistic weaknesses, it still lacks the coherence of con-

vincing allegorical narrative that can be of relevance outside its own culture.

Yet the book has a more mature narrative than its predecessor. Here the

author experiments with a complex theme, more elaborate narrative structure,

and new techniques. In this work Saadawi endeavours to create a political

allegory, a genre which has only a few precedents in modern Arabic literature. The novelty of the experiment, and the lack of clear artistic conventions in

dealing with this type of narrative in Arabic literature, may account for the

text's rudimentary structure. Yet, apart from confirming for the Western reader the hackneyed sterotype,

'think the worst of the Muslims and it will probably be true,' the book offers

little insight into what makes a person a fanatic, or motivates a leader to

become oppressive and despotic. On the artistic plain, one cannot understand

the oppressive presence of the omniscient author without relating it to Saad-

awi's desire to inverse the patriarchal order. But the inversion of social order does not mean a correction of its inherent injustice, rather a reinstating of these injustices in a new, reversed form. Although the allegorical nature of the

text, and its ideological implications, necessitate a rich dialogue between the various arguments and viewpoints, Saadawi's discourse in the book is of a

monological rather than a dialogical nature in the Bakhtinian sense of the

term. Unlike the polyphonic narrative of Fyodor Dostoyevsky which unifies

highly heterogeneous and incompatible material, the compositional principle

of Saadawi's narrative is monophonic, reducing the plurality of consciousness

to an ideological common denominator which is so simplistic as to verge on the ridiculous.

The critical assessment of Saadawi's work is an extremely difficult task. Her

road to literary creativity is paved with good causes and honourable intentions.

She aspires to achieve justice, and to fight for her sisters' rights, equality and

self-determination, in a traditional and highly patriarchal society. Any treat-

ment of her work has to acquire a fine balance between appreciating her good

intentions and pointing out the shortcomings of her literary attainments. Some-

times one has to tolerate the exaggeration in making her case as a product of

the difficult battle in which she is engaged. Introducing new ideas in such a

conservative milieu warrants certain exaggerations which are by their very nature incompatible with literary presentation. This leaves her critics in a quan-

dary, and has led some of them to advise her to confine her writing to militant

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theoretical prose. The translation of Tarabishi's arduous study on her work

reflects this dilemma; for despite the fact that most of her works are available in English translation, when her publishers sought a critical introduction to

her work in English, they found nothing but Tarabishi's book, the sole study

on her works available only in Arabic.

Translating Tarabishi's book, which is neither comprehensive nor sympa-

thetic, into English, is in a way symptomatic of the paradoxical situation

created by the gap between Saadawi's standing in the West and in her own

culture, and more significantly of the failure of her work to exert a profound influence on either the educated men of her culture whose support is vital for bringing about the radical changes she has been advocating, or on the condi-

tion of Arab women. This is so, as the title of Tarabishi's book reflects, because

of the intractable interaction between a conscious pro-feminist ideology and a

subconscious anti-feminist stance. Unfortunately, the English translation omits

the last chapter of Tarabishi's book, which focuses on Saadawi's theoretical

works (such as Woman and Sex, 1972); some of which are available in English

translation (for example, The Hidden Face of Eve, 1980). This omission weakens

the book's argument and affects its structure. Tarabishi's work relies on devel-

oping its argument partly through a critical analysis of her creative works

using a Freudian psychoanalytical approach, and partly through consolidating these views through a detailed discussion of Saadawi's theoretical works in

which she advances many of the views inferred from the analysis of her creative

works. Removing one part of the argument tilts the balance of the book and

lays it open to Saadawi's attack in her reply which replaces the omitted chapter.

In this respect I share with Saadawi her criticism of Tarabishi for depending

solely on the Freudian version of psychoanalysis in dealing with literary texts. Indeed psychoanalysis alone can neither explain the intricate nature of literary

works, nor exhaust their hermeneutic possibilities. It can only shed some light on the inner contradictions of fictive characters and in doing so it misses out

many aspects of the artistic text. Tarabishi did not suggest a complete congru- ence between the heroines and the author, but he maintains that it is possible to infer the writer's attitudes and ideas from an analysis of the characters that she has created. Although his restrictive and often reductive psychoanalytical approach weakens his argument, his main aim is to demonstrate through his critical analysis of Saadawi's heroines that the author's anti-feminine stand jeopardises her feminist stance. Yet, in certain works Saadawi's critical por- trayal of her female characters, which ostensibly appears to be anti-feminist, succeeds, on a deeper level, in demonstrating the scars of oppression on these characters.

Saadawi criticises Tarabishi for psychoanalysing her through her heroines. Yet she does not hesitate to do the same to him, and through him, all men in the Third World. She tells us that 'Tarabishi, like all men in the Third World,

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seems more impressed by women writers from the alien New World of Europe.

Arab women, on the other hand, even if they achieve as much as their foreign

counterparts and write as well as them, and perhaps with more depth, are not regarded as of equal status. Why on earth has Tarabishi only cited a foreigner

writing in English? Isn't there one Arab woman worthy of quoting?' (p 195).

The foreigner mentioned in Saadawi's quotation here is the eminent feminist,

Germaine Greer (who is not, by the way, 'a foreigner writing in English' for English is her mother tongue; unless Saadawi's use of the term 'foreigner' is a

direct rendering of the Arabic khawagaya (a white woman), a racist remark

that belongs by implication with that of the 'black' man mentioned above). Leaving that aside, it seems that Saadawi is squabbling with the form of Tara-

bishi's remark rather than its substance, in order to psychoanalyse him. It

does not occur to her that Tarabishi's praise for Greer is not because she is a

'foreigner', but merely because Greer's writing has more depth and insight

than that of her own. In her reply, Saadawi seizes the opportunity of Tara-

bishi's quotation of Greer to attribute to him, and all men of the Third World, xenophilia. But reviewing her own reply (not to mention her numerous theoreti-

cal works) reveals that one can easily level the same charge against her. In her reply she quotes only foreign writers and refers, for example, to Lacan and not

to his Egyptian associate, Mustafa Safwan. Her squabble with Tarabishi

over a great number of issues fails to offer the reader a new insight into her fictional world. This is so because the problem is not that her characters have failed to humanise the world, but rather that she has failed to humanise her characters.

Es'kia Mphahlele: a divided self?

Mafika Gwala

Renewal Time

Es'kia Mphahlele

London: Readers International. 1988. 215pp. ?9.95hb/?4.95pb

Reading the short stories of the south African writer and critic, Es'kia Mpha- hlele, and the two essays that introduce and conclude this collection, was like

going through a refresher course in terms of the need for reassessment. It laid every cultural and creative effort open to question.

The short stories were published at different periods when the author lived in exile. The two essays that sandwich them were written after the author's return to South Africa in 1977. Two of the stories included are set in independ-

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