This is a great book to spend time with, I was immediately sucked in the world of Nawal El Saadawi since I read the first line.
While I read the book, I felt as if I have look into her eyes and have known her. I can relate to her experience and thoughts, anger and sadness. She feels strongly about women's position in her society and constantly feel helpless for couldn't do more to establish a safer place for women to live in. I often have that anger with me as well.
Her words touch me deeply, and tears often well up in my eyes.
Our nation building experience, ie. Malay(si)a and Egypt had some similarities. Both countries were ruled by British, Muslim constitutes the largest population in our countries, the nationalism movement against the British colonist, the secret police systems, the war against the "freedom fighter", etc. It struck me as a country that was so far away had an almost similar nation building process.
Dr. Nawal described her first husband, a freedom fighter came back broken from the war and tell the story of betrayal by the country. These freedom fighters not only forgotten after the war, those who came back alive was hunted down by the government.
In the modern history of Malaysia's nation building process, we often encountered this type of betrayal by the government. During the Pacific War, the British seek the help from the Malayan Communist Party to form a People's army and fight the Japanese, but when the war ended, they declared Emergency in 1948 and began to hunt down the MCP members.
Malaysian government also inherited the suppression system of British, and use the secret police and also preventive arrest under the ISA to detain the dissidents continually.
I particularly shivered by her description of the secret police that appears before dawn and ring your door in order to bring you away, directly to jail.
I was also inspired by Dr. Nawal's view on women's position in the Quran and the Muslim society. Any women from around the world can easily related to this experience, where women often sexually abused by male relatives or friends, even the Iran Writer Azar Nafisi wrote of similar experience of her being molest by a pious religious relatives in her memoir Things I've been Silence About.
I admire her strength, to stand up against all form of obstacles in her life and often long for freedom as a women and as a human in her society. And also her conviction to be a writer, tell the stories of different women or man in her homeland. She even postponed her death in order to finish her novel.
With her writing, she and also the people who had been forgotten can live in the word and pages of a book. As for me, I can keep going back to her writing and see myself in some of her experience, and feel that I'm no longer alone
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