Nawal el Saadawi, at his home in Cairo in 2019.
The Egyptian writer Nawal El Saadawi (Kafr Tahl, 1931) died this Sunday at the age of 89 in a hospital in Cairo from an unspecified ailment, according to the official newspaper
Al-Ahram
.
A doctor by training, she is the author of more than fifty works translated into 40 languages in which she spoke out against polygamy, the veil, and unequal rights between men and women in the Arab world.
Many of his books are based on his personal experiences.
Nawal al Saadawi: "To be a feminist, being a woman is not enough" (Interview in 2015)
Eternal aspiring to the Nobel Prize in Literature, the controversial author of
Woman at zero point
(Captain Swing, in Spanish, and Angle, in Catalan) has known both sides of power.
She was the director of public health in her country and a UN advisor for the Women in Africa program.
But she had to publish her books in Lebanon when they were censored in Egypt and go into exile after being imprisoned and accused of being a revolutionary.
Although he returned to the country in 2011, his work is still banned there.
His first book,
Woman and Sex
(1972), was one of his most controversial works, in which he addressed society's “fear” of women's bodies and the continuous attempt to control it under religious or political pretexts.
That work was censored in Egypt and Al Saadawi was fired from his job and the Sanitary Culture Association that he founded was closed: "All this for daring to write about the private and public, corporal and intellectual misfortunes of women," as he recounts in another of his books.
According to his biography, he began to write at the age of 13 in a diary that he kept under his bed and since then he has not abandoned his pen.
Neither prison nor exile kept him from writing.
In 1981, under the government of Anwar el Sadat, he spent several months in prison for criticizing the regime, although he took advantage of his stay to write his memoirs (
The Fall of the Imam
) on a roll of toilet paper with a smuggled pencil.
Later he had to go into exile due to the threats of Islamic radicals, although he returned for the pro-democracy revolt that ended in 2011 with Hosni Mubarak and continued in the country, writing and spreading his ideals.
“I have dedicated my whole life to writing.
Despite all the obstacles, I have continued to write ”, he declared to the France Press agency in 2017.
During her last years of life she always showed herself in public without makeup and without dyeing her hair white to vindicate the role of women in their natural form, and spoke openly criticizing both the patriarchal and capitalist systems.
“Christianity, Islam and Judaism, the three monotheistic religions that dominate the world, are a macho, racist, military and fanatic system that particularly oppresses women and the poor.
In Egypt we were colonized by the British and now we are colonized by the Americans and the Europeans.
Women will never be able to be released in a country that is not liberated, ”she assured in an interview with this newspaper in 2017.