My Life Part Two

Description

“Memories flood my mind as I stand in class. Sharif began speaking about creativity and rebellion with the students, a new experience we were living at Duke University. A couple sharing the classroom as they share the bed. Sometimes conflict arises. Sharif wasn’t one of those men tormented by their masculinity. His battle in life wasn’t to prove his sexual superiority. He lived a grand dream since childhood: to change the world, to overthrow global capitalism, to establish socialism, to achieve perfect justice and love. We met around these three principles thirty years ago… In exile, I saw my city, Cairo, stretching out in my imagination between feelings of hate and love, desire and aversion. It stretched out before me in my long exile, inhabited by the faces of my friends. My heart burned with longing to live with them in this city, to wander its streets with them, to walk along the Nile under the moonlight with Raja, Safia, Samia, Rifa’iya, and Batta.” Nawal El Saadawi continues, in the second part of her autobiography, to delve into her life, transforming her “memoirs into words on drawing paper” from the memories crowding her imagination. Images that delve into the forbidden aspects of her own life, her childhood, her marriage, and her past, pausing at specific moments to dissect them with the same precision she employs in her work as a doctor. In her memoirs, Nawal exposes hidden traditions and social and political perspectives, disregarding anything that contradicts her beliefs and opinions. In doing so, she writes only to depict her suffering and tragedies, revealing herself freely and without pretense.