Articles

by Dr. Sherif Hetata

Nawal El Saadawi was definitely not a silent onlooker during the period when Egypt was under the rule of Gamal Abdel Nasser . In 1962 the Medical Union elected her as its representative in the National Congress of Popular Forces held during the same year in the month of March. The National Congress issued a Charter and the constitution of a Peoples Assembly . Fifty per cent of its members were supposed to be representatives of workers and peasants . There was much discussion of who was a worker and who was a peasant and the middle class participants who constituted the majority in the congress hypocritically played around with various definitions to ensure that they would prevent any real representation of workers and peasants . Nawal El Saadawi who at that time was 31 and had started to make her way as a novelist made a short speech in which she said : " A peasant is a man or a woman who pisses blood " ( poor peasants at that time suffered from a widespread tropical disease called Bilharziasis which made most of them bleed in their urine ) The authorities were not happy with the ironic twist in her intervention and from then on she figured on a security department black list.

Members of the Socialist Union she and her husband Sherif Hetata were critical of the party bureaucracy and its opportunism. In 1968 they stood for elections in the Medical Union against the official party list . Nawal El Saadawi was elected with the highest votes and Sherif Hetata was elected to the Cairo Province Branch . The Cairo leadership of the so called Socialist Union then dismissed them both from the party , and Nawal El Saadawi resigned from the Medical Union in protest against interference by the government Socialist Union in the elections. In the 1967 war she and her husband had volunteered for medical service at the front , and came back two weeks after the cease fire was declared . In 1968 Nawal El Saadawi spent two and half months as a volunteer doctor in the Palestinian camps if Al Salt in Jordan.

During the period of Nasser many of Nawal El Saadawi`s writings ( fiction and nonfiction ) were censored and passages deleted . Her book Woman and Sex was banned in the year 1970 before the death of Nasser on 28 September of the same year . But despite the undemocratic nature of the regime both she and her husband remained conscious of the fact that Nasser was a patriot of stature who led the country against British occupation and insisted on the independence of Egypt in the face of both American and Soviet hegemony . He also introduced many reforms of importance like free education at all levels , expanded social insurance , promulgated two agrarian reform laws , developed industry , built the High Aswan Dam and improved the rights and the standard of living of both workers and peasants . Yet Sherif Hetata spent ten years of hard labour in prison under Nasser because he refused one party system and Nawal El Saadawi was the victim of vexations which never ceased throughout.