"Memoirs of a Woman Doctor": Sound and Fury and Hope
On a short novel about life for women in Egypt, which tells us something universal about hope and transcendence.
Memoirs of a Woman Doctor, Naval El Saadawi; trans. Catherine Cobham (1988; trans. 1988)
There’s something endearing about the bold recklessness of certain first works. They often display an unabashed intimacy with passion – the kind inspired by first contact with life’s joys and hardships – that more cautious artists sacrifice when they follow “the rules”. I’m thinking of the lack of self-consciousness (both a positive and a negative) in Molly Manning Walker’s directorial debut, How to Have Sex, or the melodrama of Françoise Sagan’s first novel, Bonjour Tristesse. There’s a charm to the same qualities that perhaps hold the work back from true greatness.
To this list of delightfully reckless works, add the first novel by Nawal El Saadawi, Memoirs of a Woman Doctor. In her introduction to the book, El Saadawi tells us that she wrote Memoirs when she was in her twenties, having just graduated from the School of Medicine in Cairo. It was intended to express her “feelings and experiences as a woman who was a doctor at work, but still performed the roles of a wife and a mother at home”. She writes that she stands by her first attempt at fiction – “although I have subsequently written many novels and short stories which may be more sophisticated” – and considers it “like a first daughter, full of youthful fervour”.
The novel’s zeal and even its lack of technical sophistication are not incidental; they are what make reading it such an unbridled pleasure. The anger is hot: the narrator says of her developing breasts, “I hated them, these two protrusions, these two lumps of flesh which were determining my future! How I wished I could cut them off with a sharp knife!” The sense of injustice in these pages is ripe, revealed here in a comparison between her life and her brother’s:
“My brother woke up in the morning and left his bed just as it was, while I had to make my bed and his as well.
My brother went out into the street to play without asking my parents’ permission and came back whenever he liked, while I could only go out if and when they let me.
My brother took a bigger piece of meat than me, gobbled it up and drank his soup noisily and my mother never said a word. But I was different: I was a girl. I had to watch every movement I made, hide my longing for the food, eat slowly and drink my soup without a sound.”
This is why she writes that “the moment I opened my eyes on life, a state of enmity already existed between me and my nature”. Her femininity in both its material and metaphysical forms is what she spends the rest of the story wrestling with. The narrator says she “felt as if I were in chains – chains forged from my own blood tying me to the bed so that I couldn’t run and jump, chains produced by the cells of my own body, chains of shame and humiliation”. This oppression of girlhood (the precursor to the oppression of all femininity) couldn’t be as truthfully expressed with the weary voice of an adult who has come to accept her suffering; only the indignation of the child could so evocatively capture the injustice that adults have learned to feel less acutely, if only to survive daily life.
El Saadawi paints this picture of repression so well that, later in the book, her moments of elation at rediscovering life’s joys radiate off the page just like the “sun’s warm rays” that fall on her as she sprawls on a couch, luxuriating in simply being. The jadedness of age might lead the reader to scorn, but her sincerity is so rich that we’re instead reminded that, yes, a long afternoon of lounging and reading in the sun is good in and of itself.
The bulk of this short novel is given to our narrator’s twenties, in which she learns and practices medicine, marries a man whose feminist leanings crumble like a poorly made wall once he’s locked her into marriage, and she comes to something like a truce in the war against her own womanhood. Through all of this is a journey that foreshadows the religious uptake of scientific materialism in the West and the way many of us today are growing disillusioned with its shortcomings.
In the midst of this journey through faith, El Saadawi gives us a wondrous evocation of a person’s first meeting with what might be called the Divine. Our narrator swims in the feeling of oceanic wholeness that descends on her, bringing together the atomised pieces of life that had been separated from each other by modernity and its lack of narrative. She discovers a wonderful transcendence that binds the world together; the story that joins the scenes, the meaning that maps the moments. El Saadawi captures this so well that the reader becomes a little less cynical, regaining something of the wide-eyed belief in being that marks out this kind of youthful, optimistic book.
El Saadawi was (in her words) “young and inexperienced” when she wrote Memoirs, which is why she allowed it to be published with the artless deletions of the government censor. Sadly, the book has never been published without the Egyptian government’s hatchet job, because she lost the original manuscript – though I have to wonder why she never went back to rewrite the lost scenes. In any case, the book we get is scarred by what the censor struck out. I’m sure that the imprecise phrasing we get to imply her first period (“My head spun and I saw something red”) is the ugly result of the censor’s red pen. In such excisions and euphemisms, we see that artistic suppression offends not only the truth of literature but its beauty as well.
I imagine most authors would love the opportunity to pass final judgment on their work, and in this case, I can’t improve on what El Saadawi writes at the end of her introduction to Memoirs of a Woman Doctor: “It is a simple, spontaneous novel in which there is a lot of anger against the oppression of women in my country, but also a great deal of hope for change, for wider horizons and a better future.” For all of this book’s righteous fury and outrage, it is ultimately a work of great optimism, of humanism, and of hope.
Marginalia, plur. noun:
“In getting my books, I have always been solicitous of an ample margin … for the facility it affords me of penciling suggested thoughts, agreements and differences of opinion, or brief critical comments in general.”
~ Edgar Allan Poe