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Full Description
'Against the white sand, the contours of my father's body were well defined, emphasized its existence in a world where everything was liquid, where the blue of the sea melted into the blue of the sky with nothing between. This independent existence was to become the outer world, the world of my father, of land, country, religion, language, moral codes. It was to become the world around me. A world made of male bodies in which my female body lived.'
Nawal El Saadawi has been pilloried, censored, imprisoned and exiled for her refusal to accept the oppressions imposed on women by gender and class. For her, writing and action have been inseperable and this is reflected in some of the most evocative and disturbing novels ever written about Arab women.
Born in a small Egyptian village in 1931, she eluded the grasp of suitors before whom her family displayed her when she was still ten years old and went on to qualify as a medical doctor. In 1969, she published her first work of non-fiction, Women and Sex; in 1972, she was dismissed from her profession because of her political activism. From then on there was no respite: imprisonment under Sadat in 1981 was the culmination of the long struggle she had waged for Egyptian women's social and intellectual freedom; in 1992, her name appeared on a death list issued by a fundamentalist group after which she went into exile for five years. Since then, she has devoted her time to writing novels and essays and to her activities as a worldwide speaker on women's issues.
A Daughter of Isis is the autobiography of this extraordinary woman. In it she paints a sensuously textured portrait of the childhood that produced the freedom fighter. We see how she moulded her own creative power into a weapon - how, from an early age, the use of words became an act of rebellion against injustice.
Contents
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
