Sherif Hetata

At the end of July 1 arrived back in Cairo from the sea shore where I had sought refuge from the suffocating heat which continued to weigh down on us throughout successive weeks of this last summer.

On the voice machine I found a message reminding me that I had promised “Ferial Ghazool” an article for the coming issue of "Alif" dealing with literature and gender.

As time was running out next day I sat down at my desk to work on it. By my side I had placed some files and books extracted from the section of our library labelled “women”. In front of me was a block-note of white paper which I began to cover with notes as though eager to­ overcome the frightening void of blank pages staring at me.

Several days went by and I started to write the article. After reaching almost halfway I suddenly stopped. I felt I was performing a duty without joy or pleasure, and when that feeling assails me I know that some thing is wrong. After many years I have learnt to let my feelings guide me, make me change my mind, even if my reason tells me all is well. This is the result of the process of “ungendering” which started in my life thirty four years ago, a breaking of the patriarchal barrier which separates the body from the mind.

An irksome voice within me asked what value will it be if I write another article on gender that differs little from what has been said before? As the years go by I have started to search, very often in vain, for something new in this area, as in other areas too. May be I have lost the wonder of my earlier days. May be in this age science is creative but the humanities have little left to say. Or may be the problem lies in the distance between scholarly thought and every day life, in the abstract way the scholastic system has taught us to think and write. How could I contribute something original, something of interest that reflected me not someone else?

I seized hold of the sheets of paper covered in handwriting which I admit to be a sign of backwardness in this computer age, tore them up and dropped the pieces into the coloured wicker basket next to me . This having been done I had no alternative other than to return the books and files where they had been, to forget about the references and notes I had jotted down. Once more the blank white sheets of paper stared at me. Once more I was lost trying to find my way. Here I was writing something for an academic magazine without quoting what had been said before. I felt unarmed, alone, and weak. I had been brought up in a scholastic system where inverted commas, footnotes and references had rescued me from thinking, where the thought, the experience of ordinary human beings like me did not belong with knowledge, was not of value intellectually.

But despite the risk I may be running with those who will read me, I decided to write this article about my life, about my male gender and what for many years it did to me.

* * * *

That morning of the sixth day of November 1963 I climbed up the narrow winding steps behind the policeman who had opened the door to let me out of the foul, suffocating underground jail of Kasr at Nil packed to over flowing with criminals, pimps, drug pedlars, beggars, drunks and thieves standing or squatting on the cement floor with a pail of water for drinking, and a pail full of excreta for excreting placed side by side near the wall. I had been kept in this room for three nights and two days as a farewell send off after fifteen years in jail.

I walked through the sunlit streets of what was a beautiful green Garden City covered with gleaming drops of early morning dew, unable to take in the reality of being free, of an open blue sky, and rustling trees, of children on their way to school, as though after so many years in a cell I had lost the ability to feel.

I was twenty five years old that summer night when yuzbashi (1) Mamdouh Salem, Prime Minister many years later under Sadat closed the cell door on me in the Alexandria city jail called Hadra Prison, forty years old when hand cuffed and closely guarded I rode the train from Mahareek(2) Prison in the southernmost part of the western desert, on a thousand kilometre journey before being released at the end of a hard labor sentence from Cairo Prison.

Three months later I was given a job in the Ministry of Health and found myself sitting in a room next to the latrines. The room was like a cell, and the latrines had a familiar smell so at the beginning I did not feel that much had changed.

There were five desks in the room, and we were five people, one behind each desk, trying not to look at each other. Mine was the smallest and the oldest with a cracked top that lodged splinters in my flesh. The faces that were there, or walked in through the door seemed all the same, their features moulded into a wan submission.

All except hers. She sat at a desk opposite the door, a halo of silvery hair, two intense black eyes, and a face alive with the movement of her soul.

She belonged to another world and so did I. They said she had been married twice, had divorced twice and wrote stories about things that a woman should keep hidden. They said I was a dangerous, scheming rebel. We looked at one another, talked, held hands in a casino by the river, swam in the sea, made love and one year later we were married.

* * * *

My mother’s face looks down on me from her picture on the wall. Her look is deep, her nose is straight, her forehead high, her face full of sadness, full of strength. I never knew what it meant for her to be a woman, never knew who she really was until years after I walked behind her coffin, until that moment when I realized that she had gone for ever.

She and I were never close. Something came between us. Born of an English family, she taught me discipline and hard work, never put her arms around me. So I became a serious youth, lacked a spontaneous warmth and rarely laughed. From an early age I put a shell around myself.

But mother was no ordinary woman and I owe a lot to her. I never told her that and now it is too late.

When she reached the age of fifty six my father married another woman. So she looked for a job and found one as an English teacher. In our family because of her work was considered important for every one, male or female, and equality between the sexes was looked upon as natural . So for me the problem of gender did not arise until I met that woman with the silver hair, and two black eyes and we started to live together.

* * * *

Her name was Nawal el Saadawi. She was a doctor, a writer and a mother with one daughter who was seven years old. These facts hovered at the margin of my conscious being. What mattered, what occupied my mind was the woman, her love, her warmth, her unending enthusiasm, like a breath of life going through my tired body.

I was lean and brown, burnt by the desert sun, more silent than ever. I had had only few relations with women. They had been occasions for romance or sexual pleasure, snatched either before or in between periods of hiding, exile and extended prison.

Like her I had gone to medical college and become a practising physician. I belonged to one of the oldest patriarchal professions. In it the mind and the body remained separate worlds, and there was no room for women except as nurses, or as assistants to highly autocratic male doctors and professors. Women were known to us as gynecology and obstetrics, in other words as a female reproductive apparatus with the clitoris missing and always ignored as an organ because sexual pleasure in females is related to the devil. Psychic disorders in women were treated by doctors applying their male knowledge which at its worst reflected a concealed antagonism, and at its best smacked of kindly paternalism

Now when I remember the faces of the women we used to examine I wish I had not been there when it happened.

* * * *

In one of the drawers of my house in the village I came upon an old photograph of myself after I graduated from medical college. The face that looked out at me was grim, with a frown and a faraway look in the eyes as though I had taken an important decision.

I was twenty three when I decided the boundaries of the medical profession were too narrow, plunged into the turbulent after World War 2 of political struggles, and started to pour into Marxist books trying to discover another way of being. Among them were books which said that women were oppressed not only because of class, and race, and religion but also because they were women . Engels had written “The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State” showing how these institutions had developed, and how they had led to the oppression of women. The Manifesto issued by the First International described how women were sold in the marriage market to the highest bidder, and how prostitution was an outlet for men to have extra marital sex, and yet maintain the family unit as one of the corner stones that kept bourgeois society going.

These books about women's oppression were important, but the Egyptian left wing movement in which I was involved paid no attention to them. Women were just a part of the anticolonialist struggle, and matters ended there, with perhaps a few words about their right to work, maternity leave, crèches and other things like that. Gender relations never entered the arena of political struggle. The personal, and with it the family, and relations between men and women remained a private matter. The personal was divorced from the political, from the public, and the result was that both continued to be dominated by patriarchal thought. Politics were left to be ruled by a minority of men with power and money, and the few, the very few women who got in were chosen by men with authority, were subordinated to them, made to fulfil subsidiary tasks, to be auxiliaries who operate within the framework of an ideology and a political agenda defined by groups of men to serve the interests and the aims of the system which continues to oppress women.

* * * *

When I met Nawal El Saadawi this was my political baggage. In addition for fifteen years I had lived only with men, with political prisoners, criminals and jailers. My world was that of clandestine struggle, where thoughts and emotions were often bottled up inside. The soil in which words and feelings could grow, break through, express themselves had become dry. Revolution had been transformed into an abstract world of categories and calculations where the individual human being, the self, no longer mattered. Women: wives, lovers, sisters, mothers flared up in the imagination at moments of stress, or desire only to fall back into the deep recesses of a semi-forgetfulness.

Perhaps I was better prepared than most men for a different phase in my life. My mother had taught me respect for women . I had always been on the move, had taken risks, was accustomed to change . Nawal and I, were equal partners. That was a tacit agreement to which it seemed that nothing need be added.

I did not know that to marry a woman who was really serious about the rights of women was not as simple as all that, nor did I realize that gender is embedded in every aspect of our lives, in the deepest recesses of our hearts and minds, and bodies.

* * * *

In those days I had not heard the word “feminist” and in any case even if I had, it would not have meant very much to me.

I soon discovered that for Nawal it meant not giving up her rights even in the smallest of matters. At first I could not understand, but as the years went by I realized that the path of small concessions has been for many a woman a way to lose her rights.

Our first struggles were over trivial things, like how to divide up the domestic chores between us. It took some time before we settled down to a just and flexible way of handling them. If Nawal was working, or writing I cooked. When I went to a meeting she washed up. We arranged to clean the house in turn. When the children were small and still needed daily care one of us would stay at home if the other had work to do, or travelled, or lived abroad for a period of time, or was sent to prison. As a family we took all decisions together, consulted our daughter and our son even when they were still quite young. It was always useful and sometimes funny. At one time Nawal and I were thinking of having another child so we asked them to tell us what they thought. My son who was five years old pondered the question for a while before saying: “On condition it won't be a boy or else when I grow up I'll be taken to the army".

At the same time I began to meet many of the women with whom Nawal was cooperating, to attend their meetings, to read the books on women she brought home. Sometimes I wrote a paper, or took part in discussions, but most of the time I listened.

Now I was talking a lot with Nawal and sometimes with the other women. Gradually what may be called the “feminine part” in me was coming out. I became interested in what were considered the “smaller” things in life, delved deeper into myself, brought out what was hidden. My dialogue with Nawal has never stopped since we married.

* * * *

When Nawal and I started to live together she was already a well-known writer. I had been through all sorts of experiences which I thought she could make use of as raw material for one or two of her stories .

So one evening we sat down on opposite sides of a table. In front of her she put a small ream of the cheap slightly grayish paper she was fond of writing on. In front of me I put some notes, a small recorder and two spare tapes. I started to tell her my story, and for more than sixty nights we sat down like that, with me talking, the recorder turning and her pen racing over the sheets of paper.

The time flew past as though the nights were rolling. Then one night she said she had enough material. Next day she started writing.

Three months went by and one morning. I saw her collect her papers and put them in an orange folder with an elastic band at each corner. That night she handed me the folder and said “I've finished the novel and I want you to read it”.

It was close on dawn when I finished reading. The novel was called “El Ghaib” which means “Missing”. Years later it was translated into English and published under the title “Searching”. I liked the novel but felt a tinge of disappointment . There was nothing in it related to the things I had told her. When I asked her why she said I can only write about what is related to my own experiences. Only you can write the stories you told me.

I said: “But I do not think I can do that”.

“Have you ever tried writing a novel before”. She asked

“No never”. I answered

“Then how can you tell if you' ve never tried to do it ?

“I’m sure I can't. I don't have a gift for that kind of writing”.

“I think you're wrong. The way you told me your story made me feel you have the talent, that you are creative”.

I did not take what she had said to me seriously. But she kept asking me. “Have you started writing”? To which I answered “No you’re not really serious are you”? “Of course I am” was her reply.

So one day out of curiosity I sat down and wrote a few pages. But when I read them I felt they were awful, tore them up quickly and threw them into the waste paper basket.

A few days later she asked me “What have you done with your writing”? “Nothing”, I said “Believe me you can do it”, she said.

A month went by, then late one summer night as I sat listening to the city quietly breathing, I got up, sat down at my desk and pulled out a pen and some paper. Two years later I finished my first novel. It was called “The Eye With An Iron Lid” and was drawn from my prison­ experience. Since then I have written five novels, two travelogues and an auto biography of over a thousand pages. I do not believe that a man can write an auto- biography, can write with courage about himself if he has not broken through his male gender shell.

In all my writing women play an important role as subjects, and that is some thing distinctive about them. My auto-biography is called “Al Nawafiz Al Maftouha” which means. “Open Windows” and in it my relationship with Nawal, the love and friendship we have lived together occupies a special place.

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(1) Captain

(2) literally " Incinerator Prison due to the burning, desert heat.