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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2025
Over the ground, my fingers sketch letters and interlacing circles. My hand trembles with anger, and my heartbeat quickens. If my fingers had not come to know the pen, perhaps they would have known the hoe. The pen is the most valuable thing in my life. My words on paper are more valuable to me than my life itself. More valuable than my children, more than my husband, more than my freedom.
I prefer my place in prison to writing something which has not originated in my mind. The sincere word demands a courage akin to that needed to kill – and perhaps more.
My fingers chisel the letters in the dirt. I contemplate the words which are circling round in my head. What appeared to me as certain a moment ago I see now as surrounded in the fog of doubt. To this moment, I don't know why I am in prison. I have seen no investigator or prosecuting attorney or lawyer. I heard the shawisha say that she heard they were saying I entered prison because of my writings … my crime, therefore, comes under the rubric of crimes of opinion.
Is free opinion a crime? Then let prison be my only refuge and my final fate!
The writing of Nawal El Saadawi, Egypt's incendiary feminist icon, is so suffused with her metatextual personality, her highly cultivated, extroverted character, that its flagrant egotism comes to seem more like a grammar all its own. Seventeen times in some 220 words here the first-person singular possessive pronoun rings out, joining the ranks of ten first-person singular pronouns, and various implied uses nestled into clauses otherwise bereft. This is a translation, of course, but it is in much the same voice Nawal uses for her English prose and her spoken interviews and speeches in English: adverting compulsively to itself, its quality as ‘personned’ in the body of its speaker, an ego compacted of so much mass and substance that language finds itself, its very parts of speech and lexemes, held fast in orbit around that lively, imperious Self. No other prison writer takes such abundant refuge in the safe harbour of her own person.
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