God Dies by the Nile and Other Novels

PRAISE FOR
GOD DIES BY THE NILE

‘A quietly formidable achievement; its understated evocation of tragedy and strength in the face of victimization make it a graceful classic.' –
Women's Review

‘Powerfully political.' –
Poetry Nation Review

‘Nawal El Saadawi's achievement is to lay bare the thin flesh and huge passions of her characters.' –
West Indian Digest

PRAISE FOR
SEARCHING

‘Nawal El Saadawi once again presents a psychological drama that will take you into the depths of a woman's despair. Intimate details and vivid descriptions fill this story of an ordinary person who ends up teetering over the abyss of insanity… This is a novel of Cairo with the languid Nile winding its way through a story of love, guilt, betrayal and redemption.' –
Miriam Cooke, Professor of Modern Arabic Literature, Duke University

‘
Searching
is an intense exploration of the state of mind of a young Egyptian woman who longs for both professional and personal meaning in her life, but finds herself isolated and adrift in a Kafkaesque world of senseless work. Saadawi creates a hellish vision of Cairo. Her protagonist finds herself utterly alone in a world dominated by casual, brutal patriarchy and a shadowy authoritarian state. This is a disturbing text that makes the reader feel trapped in a world that often feels like a particularly bad recurrent dream.' –
Jane Plastow, Professor of African Theatre, Leeds University

PRAISE FOR
THE CIRCLING SONG

‘To read this book is like looking into a kaleidoscope; as each new element in the story is added, so a new configuration is formed.' –
Independent

‘Nawal El Saadawi's technique is impressive: at once precise, controlled and hypnotic, even in translation. The style and meaning of the book are one. A song with no beginning and no end, the author tells its universal story.' –
Everywoman

‘This novel is a powerful example of the kind of anger and desperation to which Arab women writers are beginning to give vent.' –
Choice

‘Nawal El Saadawi is a legend in her own time. This is an ambitious work indeed.' –
American Book Review

‘One of Saadawi's most powerful books that we have had the privilege to read in English. Unusual, original and unexpected, it's one of those very rare books which address you in many languages and can take you in many different directions at once.' –
Spare Rib

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nawal El Saadawi is an internationally renowned writer, novelist and fighter for women's rights both within Egypt and abroad.

Born in 1931, in a village outside Cairo, she wrote her first novel,
Diary of a Child Called Souad
, at the age of thirteen. Unusually, she and her brothers and sisters were educated together. After graduating from the University of Cairo Medical School in 1955, specializing in psychiatry, she practised as a medical doctor for two years.

From 1963 until 1972, Saadawi worked for the Egyptian government as Director General for Public Health Education. During this time, she studied at Columbia University in New York, where she received her Master's degree in Public Health in 1966. In 1972, however, she lost her job in the government as a result of political pressure. The magazine
Health
, which she founded and had edited for more than three years, was closed down.

From 1973 to 1978 Saadawi worked at the High Institute of Literature and Science. It was at this time that she began to write, in works of fiction and non-fiction, the books on the oppression of Arab women for which she has become famous. Her most renowned novel,
Woman at Point Zero
, was published in Beirut in 1973. It was followed in 1976 by
God Dies by the Nile
and in 1977 by her study of Arab women,
The Hidden Face of Eve
.

In 1981 Nawal El Saadawi publicly criticized the one-party rule of President Anwar Sadat, and was subsequently arrested and imprisoned. She was released one month after Sadat's assassination. In 1982, she established the Arab Women's Solidarity Association, which was outlawed in 1991. For some years during the Mubarak regime, Saadawi lived in exile, teaching in universities in the USA and Europe, including Duke University and Washington State University. Saadawi returned to Egypt in 1996. In 2004 she presented herself as a candidate for the presidential elections in Egypt, with a platform of human rights, democracy and greater freedom for women. In July 2005, however, she was forced to withdraw her candidacy in the face of ongoing government persecution.

Nawal El Saadawi has achieved widespread international recognition for her work. She holds honorary doctorates from, among others, the universities of York, Illinois at Chicago, St Andrews and Tromso as well as Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Her many prizes and awards include the Premi Internacional Catalunya in 2003, the Council of Europe North–South Prize in 2004, the Women of the Year Award (UK) in 2011, the Sean MacBride Peace Prize (Ireland) in 2012, and the French National Order of Merit in 2013. Her books have been translated into over forty languages worldwide. They are taught in universities across the world.

GOD DIES BY
THE NILE

AND OTHER NOVELS

GOD DIES BY THE NILE • SEARCHING
THE CIRCLING SONG

NAWAL EL SAADAWI

TRANSLATIONS BY SHERIF HETATA, SHIRLEY EBER

God Dies by the Nile and Other Novels
was first published in 2015 by Zed Books Ltd, Unit 2.8 The Foundry, 17 Oval Way, London SE115RR, UK

www.zedbooks.co.uk

God Dies by the Nile
was first published in Arabic in Beirut in 1974, under the title
The Death of the Only Man on Earth
, and first published in English in 1985 by Zed Books Ltd.

Copyright © Nawal El Saadawi, 1974, 1985, 2007

Foreword copyright © Nawal El Saadawi, 2007

English translation copyright © Zed Books Ltd, 1985

Searching
was first published in English in 1991 by Zed Books Ltd.

Copyright © Nawal El Saadawi 1991, 2009

Foreword copyright © Anastasia Valassopoulos 2009

The Circling Song
was first published in English in 1989 by Zed Books Ltd

Copyright © Nawal El Saadawi 1989, 2009

Foreword copyright © Fedwa Malti-Douglas 2009

The right of Nawal El Saadawi to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of Zed Books Ltd.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78360-596-5 pb

ISBN 978-1-78360-597-2 hb

ISBN 978-1-78360-744-0 pdf

ISBN 978-1-78360-745-7 epub

ISBN 978-1-78360-746-4 mobi

CONTENTS

GOD DIES BY THE NILE

SEARCHING

THE CIRCLING SONG

GOD DIES
BY THE NILE

 

NAWAL EL SAADAWI

TRANSLATED BY SHERIF HETATA

INTRODUCTION

I was six or seven years of age when I heard about a poor peasant girl who drowned herself in the Nile – she had been working in the house of the village mayor. My grandmother whispered something that I didn't understand in my mother's ear. At the age of ten I heard about another girl who fled during the night. She was a servant in the same house, fourteen years old and pregnant. Nobody accused the mayor, except a young peasant who had been planning to marry the girl. He was shot in the fields and no-one was captured. In a dream, I saw the mayor in prison accused of raping servant girls and robbing the women of their harvest. When I told my grandmother, she said it was impossible, that the mayor was a god and no-one could punish him. She said that the mayor exploited the peasants to serve the king's interest, and the king exploited the mayor and the peasants to serve the interests of the British army in the Suez canal. The word ‘god' echoed around me but I didn't know its real meaning and I instinctively didn't like it. My parents gave my brother more freedom and more food than me, though I was better at school and helped my mother more. When I asked why, they told me that it is what God said.
I felt that God was unjust like the mayor and the king, and that he deserved to be punished, but I kept this to myself.

These women and men in my village inspired me to write
God Dies by the Nile
. Zakeya is not very different from my grandmother and my aunts, relatives and neighbours. In addition to the oppression of colonial rule at that time, women were oppressed by men in the family, in society and in the streets. Poor women were more vulnerable than rich women.

In 1972 I published my first non-fiction book about women and sex. It was banned by the authorities and I was promptly dismissed from my post in the government. I found myself at home with nothing to do but write. I wrote fiction partly because I enjoyed it more, and partly because it seemed less likely to be banned – most of the censors were half-literate civil servants on low salaries, I did not imagine that they would read novels. I sat alone in my small apartment in Giza thinking about my new novel. I don't know why my childhood memory came back to me, especially the image of the mayor and his men sitting smoking by the banks of the Nile, looking at the girls walking past with jars on their heads. The faces of my grandmother and other poor women in my family appeared vividly to me. I finished the novel in two months. Writing it gave me enormous pleasure, a pleasure which sustained me inside prison, and which is more essential to me than breathing.

At that time, Sadat was pursuing his so-called ‘open door policy', opening Egypt to foreign, especially American,
goods and investment. The result was increased poverty, unemployment, religious fundamentalism and the veiling of and discrimination against women. The Islamization of Egypt went hand in hand with the Americanization. The shops sold imported veils from the USA and Saudi Arabia and prayer mats from Mecca, alongside red lipstick and tight blue jeans. The majority of people in Egypt were deprived of their basic material needs. Our television screens were flooded with religious men preaching chastity, modesty, spirituality and the veil, interspersed with adverts that used naked women's bodies to sell imported foreign goods. For women, the veil and female genital mutilation came to be part of authentic Islamic identity. I found it impossible to be silent. I published my articles in opposition newspapers and eventually found myself in prison, accused of betraying Egypt. One month later, however, in 1981, Sadat was assassinated and I was released by the new president.

God Dies by the Nile
didn't escape this climate of censorship and oppression. Like most of my work, it had to be published in Lebanon. My Lebanese publisher in Beirut changed the title to
Death of the Only Man on Earth
. He told me that God cannot die, and when I tried to explain that the word god is a symbol for the head of the village, he said ‘Yes, I know, but religious fanatics will not understand this and will burn my publishing house.' This actually happened several years later. In 1982
God Dies by the Nile
was published, with
another fourteen of my books, by a publisher called Madbouli in Cairo. He used the Lebanese title. He said ‘They will burn my publishing house if I publish a book with a title like that. God does not die, he lives eternally.'

Thus the book was never published in Arabic with its original title, although it is reprinted to this day. Ten editions at least have come out since I wrote it. I think many women and men still read it. I have received many letters from readers saying that the village in the novel did not differ much from their village. Some men were angry and accused me of mocking Islam and encouraging heresy.