Description

By (author) El Saadawi, Nawal

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In A Daughter of Isis, Nawal El Saadawi, author of Woman at Point Zero and one of the Arab world’s greatest writers, tells the story of the formative years which shaped an iconic voice in global feminism. In poignant and moving prose we learn about her relationships with her family, her traumatic experience of female genital mutilation at seven years old and escaping suitors at tenand her journey from the rural Egyptian village of her birth to metropolitan Cairo to study medicine. Filled with warmth as well as critical reflection, this book reveals the early years of a remarkable life dedicated to the fight for justice and equality.

Table of contents:

Foreword
Preface – The Gift
1. Allah and McDonalds
2. The Cry in the Night
3. God Above, Husband Below
4. We Thank God for our Calamities
5. Flying with the Butterflies
6. Killing the Bridegroom
7. Daughter of the Sea
8. My Revolutionary Father
9. The Lost Servant-Girl
10. The Village of Forgotten Employees
11. God Hid Behind the Coat-Stand
12. The Ministry of Nauseation
13. Dreaming of Pianos
14. To the Circus
15. The Singing Man
16. The Whiskered Peasant
17. Uncles, Suitors and other Bloodsuckers
18. A Stove for my Mother
19. Coming to Cairo
20. The Long, Strong Bones of a Horse
21. Love and the Hideous Cat
22. Art Thieves
23. Mad Aunts and Abandoned Babies
24. The House of Desolation
25. The Secret Communist
26. Wasted Lives
27. Cholera, Ageing and Death
28. The Qur”an Betrayed
29. British English and Holy Arabic
30. The Name of Marx
31. The Brush of History
Afterword – Living in Resistance

Review quote:
In this book we see how, from an early age, Saadawi combines her love of the Arabic language with her awareness of gender-based oppression to create texts which are as subversive as they are moving

Review quote:
As I finished reading Dr. Nawal”s autobiography I felt a sudden sense of loss. I didn”t want to leave her. I went back and read the last sections again, and then again, until I remembered how many other books she has written. Then I felt delight that I will be able to return to her words and to her stories, and that so many others will share in them

Review quote:
This is a book we should all be reading

Review quote:
I think her life has been one long death threat. At a time when nobody else was talking, she spoke the unspeakable

Biographical note:

Nawal El Saadawi was born in a village outside Cairo, Egypt, in 1931. A trained medical doctor, she wrote landmark works on the oppression of Arab women including Woman at Point Zero (1973), God Dies by the Nile (1976) and The Hidden Face of Eve (1977).After being imprisoned by Anwar Sadat’s government for criticising the regime, she founded the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association in 1982, before being forced into exile in later life due to death threats by religious extremists. She returned to Egypt in 1996, running for president in 2005 until government persecution forced her to withdraw. Saadawi died in Egypt in 2021.

Promotional headline:
Volume one of the autobiography of Nawal El Saadawi, the Arab world”s leading feminist.

Feature:
Volume one of the autobiography of Nawal El Saadawi, the Arab world”s leading feminist

Feature:
Paints a beautifully textured portrait of the childhood that moulded Saadawi into a novelist and fearless campaigner for freedom and the rights of women

Feature:
Combines Saadawi’s love of the Arabic language with her awareness of gender-based oppression to create texts which are as subversive as they are moving