My Papers My Life Part One

Description

“Tonight I was flipping through my memories and old papers. Some had turned to thin, yellowed paper, their lines worn and the words faded. Others were ruined by the rain and high humidity in Durham, North Carolina… Yet I care. These papers are my life, the dreams of my childhood and youth. I cherish these memories despite the pain. I summon them, I fix them in my imagination, for they are my story of love when I was twenty. What love could be deeper than this? Its misery was a kind of ecstasy; the bewilderment of pain reveals new sorrows known only to saints and lovers… Today I am no longer young; I am an old woman, past sixty. I am neither happy nor unhappy. I sit suspended like a hair or a feather in a zone of weightlessness… Writing has been my only refuge since childhood, a way to escape to it from mother, father, and suitor. And writing remains in my old age the only refuge, or the last, a pleasurable reconciliation through writing with the past and the present, with all the wounds inflicted upon me in my homeland. I was not like My sisters… I sought to achieve everything through imagination… otherwise, why would a person fall in love? Why all this pain when meeting another? In this memoir, Nawal El Saadawi’s words transform into a rebellious act, a courageous deed that sometimes shocks the reader but compels them to break free from their shell, provoking them to confront themselves and others without pretense. Nawal El Saadawi is a human being and a writer who rejected oppression on both a personal and public level, and this book is but a part of her life story, a story that pulsates with both pain and hope.