Memoirs of a Woman Doctor (Middle Eastern Fiction)

by El Saadawi, Nawal

  I was convulsed by a strange and violent trembling. For a moment which passed like lightning through my feelings, I wished he would stretch out his arm further and hold me tight, but then this odd secret desire was transformed into a wild fury.

  My anger only made him more persistent and he held on to me with an iron grip. I don’t know where I got the strength, but I threw off his arm and it flailed in the air while I brought my hand down hard across his face.

  I turned over and over in bed in utter confusion. Strange sensations swept through me and images flashed before my eyes. One of them lodged itself in front of me and wouldn’t go away: my cousin lying on the ground beside me, his arm nearly round my waist and his strange glances boring into my head. I closed my eyes and was borne along by my fantasy in which his arms moved tightly round me and his lips pressed firmly down on mine.

  I buried my head under the covers, unable to believe that I’d slapped him with the hand I was now picturing quivering in his. I pulled the covers tightly over my head to shut out my strange dream but it crept back, so I put the pillow over my head and pressed it down as hard as I could to suffocate the stubborn ghost, until sleep finally overtook me.

  I opened my eyes the following morning. The sunlight had chased away the darkness and all the phantoms that prowled in its shadows. I opened the window and the fresh air blew in, chasing away the last clinging traces of the night’s dreams. I smiled scornfully at the cowardly part of me which trembled with fear at the stronger part when I was awake, but then crept into my bed at night and filled the darkness around me with fantasies and illusions.

  In my final year at secondary school I came out top of my group… I sat wondering what to do…

  I hated my femininity, resented my nature and knew nothing about my body. All that was left for me was to reject, to challenge, to resist! I would reject my femininity, challenge my nature, resist all the desires of my body; prove to my mother and grandmother that I wasn’t a woman like them, that I wouldn’t spend my life in the kitchen peeling onions and garlic, wasting all my days so that my husband could eat and eat.

  I was going to show my mother that I was more intelligent than my brother, than the man she’d wanted me to wear the cream dress for, than any man, and that I could do everything my father did and more.

  2

  The faculty of medicine? Yes, medicine… The word had a terrifying effect on me. It reminded me of penetrating eyes moving at an amazing speed behind shiny steel-rimmed spectacles, and strong pointed fingers holding a dreadful long sharp needle. I remembered the first time I’d ever seen a doctor: my mother was trembling with fright, looking up at him beseechingly and reverently; my brother was terrified; my father was lying in bed begging for help. Medicine was a terrifying thing. It inspired respect, even veneration, in my mother and brother and father. I would become a doctor then, study medicine, wear shiny steel-rimmed spectacles, make my eyes move at an amazing speed behind them, and make my fingers strong and pointed to hold the dreadful long sharp needle. I’d make my mother tremble with fright and look at me reverently; I’d make my brother terrified and my father beg me for help. I’d prove to nature that I could overcome the disadvantages of the frail body she’d clothed me in, with its shameful parts both inside and out. I would imprison it in the steel cell forged from my will and my intelligence. I wouldn’t give it a single chance to drag me into the ranks of illiterate women.

  I stood in the courtyard of the faculty of medicine, looking about me. Hundreds of eyes directed sharp questioning glances at me. I looked squarely back at them. Why should I lower my eyes when they looked at me, bow my head while they were lifting theirs, stumble along while they walked with a proud and confident step? I was the same as them, or better. I drew myself up to my full height. I’d forgotten about my breasts and their weight on my chest had vanished. I felt light, as if I could move as easily and freely as I wanted. I had charted my way in life, the way of the mind. I had carried out the death sentence on my body so that I no longer felt it existed.

  I stood at the door of the dissecting room: a surprisingly penetrating smell… naked human corpses on white marble slabs. My feet carried me in fearfully. I went up to one of the naked corpses and stood beside it. It was a man’s body, completely naked. The students were looking at me, smiling slyly and waiting to see what I would do. I almost turned away and ran out, but no, I wasn’t going to do that. On my other side I saw a woman’s naked body surrounded by a cluster of students inspecting it boldly and without shame. I turned my gaze back to the man’s corpse and examined it steadily and unflinchingly, taking the scalpel in my hand.

  This was my first encounter with a naked man, and in the course of it men lost their dread power and illusory greatness in my eyes. A man had fallen from his throne and lay on a dissecting table next to a woman. Why had my mother made all these tremendous distinctions between me and my brother, and portrayed man as a god whom I would have to serve in the kitchen all my life? Why had society always tried to convince me that manhood was a distinction and an honour, and womanhood a weakness and a disgrace? Would my mother ever believe that I’d stood with a naked man in front of me and a knife in my hand, and opened up his stomach and his head? Would society believe that I’d examined a man’s body and taken it to pieces without caring that it was a man?

  Who was this society anyway? Wasn’t it men like my brother brought up from childhood to think of themselves as gods, and weak, ineffectual women like my mother? How could such people believe that there existed a woman who knew nothing about a man except that he was an assortment of muscles, arteries, nerves and bones?

  A man’s body! The terror of mothers and little girls who sweltered in the heat of the kitchen to fill it with food, and carried the spectre of it with them day and night. Here was just such a body spread out before me naked, ugly and in pieces. I hadn’t imagined that life would prove my mother wrong so soon, or give me my revenge in this way over that miserable man who’d looked at my breasts one day and not seen anything else of me besides them. Here I was slinging his arrows straight back into his chest. Here I was looking at his naked body and feeling nauseated, tearing him to shreds with my scalpel.

  Was this a man’s body, the outside covered with hair and the inside full of decaying stinking organs, his brain floating in a sticky white fluid and his heart in thick red blood? How ugly man was, both inside and out… as ugly as could be!

  I examined the young woman lying under my scalpel on the white marble table. Her long hair was soft and dyed red but it had been washed in formalin. Her teeth were white and shiny, with a gold one at the front, but they were all yellow near the roots; her breasts were drooping and skinny. Those two pieces of flesh which had tormented me in childhood, which determined girls’ futures and inflamed men’s eyes and minds, had come to rest shrivelled and dried up like a piece of old shoe leather. How lacking in substance were girls’ futures, how insignificant that which filled the hearts and eyes of men! And the long shiny hair that my mother had plagued me with — woman’s crowning glory which she carries on her head and wastes half her life arranging, shining and dyeing — fell into the filthy bin along with other unwanted bodily matter and scraps of flesh.

  I felt a sour taste in my throat and spat out the piece of meat from my mouth. I tried to chew on a piece of bread but my teeth moved with difficulty. I tried to swallow and felt the bread scraping against the walls of my larynx and down into my stomach. I felt the acid juices secreted by my stomach walls working on the bread and my intestine expanding to receive it. I felt something weighing down on my chest and knew it was my heart pumping, chasing the blood into the arteries. I felt the blood creeping back along my veins and the faint pulsating of the capillaries in my limbs. I felt the air entering my nostrils and passing down my throat to fill my lungs. They expanded like balloons until the air stopped coming into my chest and I seemed to be choking. My lips stopped moving, I couldn’t stretch out my arms, the muscles of my heart weren’
t contracting and my veins were no longer throbbing with blood.

  Ah, I’d died! I jumped up in fright…

  No, I wasn’t going to die! I refused to join all the corpses stretched out in front of me on the tables. I put down my scalpel and raced out of the dissecting room. In the street I looked around me in astonishment as people walked and moved their arms and legs without a moment’s thought, running easily to catch buses, opening their mouths and moving their lips and talking and breathing without the slightest difficulty.

  I calmed down. Life went on and I was still alive. I opened my mouth wide and filled my lungs with the air of the street and breathed in deeply. I moved my arms and legs and walked in the midst of the surging mass of humanity. Ah, how simple life is when one takes it as it comes!

  A small roundish object, an egg-shaped piece of flesh, was quivering under my scalpel. I took hold of it in one hand and put it on the scales. I felt it with the tips of my fingers; its surface was soft and convoluted, just like the rabbit’s brain which I’d dug out of its little skull on the table earlier. Was it possible that this was the brain of a human being? Could this piece of moist tender flesh be the mighty human mind that had triumphed over nature and gone down into the bowels of the earth and up into orbit with the sun and moon, which could split rocks and move mountains and extract enough fire from atoms to destroy the world?

  I seized the scalpel and cut the brain up into pieces, then the pieces into still more pieces. I looked and felt and probed and found nothing. Only a piece of soft flesh which disintegrated under my fingers.

  I put a sliver of it under the microscope and saw nothing but round cells containing round nuclei like bunches of grapes. How did they work and make people aware and able to understand and feel? I opened the textbook and looked at the illustrations showing the workings of the brain. They were like drawings of complicated machinery, a television, an aircraft or a submarine, or like a map of the world: hundreds of transmitting and receiving posts, millions of nerves and thread-like filaments and I knew that the piece of flesh in my hand was in charge of all this. It received messages from all the organs of the body and then sent orders to them through strings of nerves. How could this be, this little ball of flesh giving orders to the heart, the arms, the legs; saying to the heart ‘Move’, to the arms ‘Go down’ or ‘Come up’, to the legs ‘Walk’ or ‘Stop’? How could this whole interwoven network of nerve cells operate without crashing into each other? What made it decode the secret of the messages sent to it by the eye, the nose, the ear, the tongue, the fingertips, without confusing them with each other? I looked back at the little round cells through the microscope and wondered again how life could invade these minute amounts of protoplasm and move and understand and know.

  I opened my textbooks to look into this mystery. The chemistry books said that there may be chemical reactions which modify and activate the components of the substance. The physics books talked of electricity altering its atoms and releasing life, and the physiology book spoke of reflexes and secretions.

  I began to read and search and probe until I’d learnt the structure and organization of the human body by heart. I learnt the names of all the parts of the nervous system and the way the nerve cells transmit messages around the body; the names of the veins and arteries, how long and broad they were, what sort of walls they had; the make-up of bones, bone marrow and blood; how I ate; how all my senses functioned; and how I slept and dreamt. I discovered how my heart beat and why I blushed; how I felt fire burning and how to draw my hand away from it; why I sweated with embarrassment and why my extremities turned cold through fear.

  The heart was like a house: it had rooms with muscle-walls and valve-doors; the walls of one room contracted and its doors opened and forced the blood out of it into the next room whose muscular walls were relaxed, then the valve-door closed… The heartbeats were the small noises made by the blood going from one room to another and the doors opening and shutting. But how did the heart muscles know when to contract and when to relax? A message! A telegram transmitted to them by a nerve connected to a centre in the chest, which led in turn to one of the centres in the brain. How did the blood from the lungs reach the heart and how did it go back once more to the lungs to be purified? It was all controlled by a precise and strict system. Every cavity in the body had a special membrane and the blood pressure was strictly regulated as it passed ceaselessly from vessel to vessel.

  Why did I feel fire burning my finger? Because the nerve endings in my fingers transmitted a message to the brain, which interpreted it as being a pain caused by burning and sent a rapid message to my arm muscles ordering them to contract and take my finger away from the fire. Who would have thought that these messages could flow back and forth between the fingertips and the brain in the time it takes us to remove our fingers from the heat which is burning them?

  I didn’t sweat from embarrassment until negotiations had taken place between the nerve centres in my brain and my sweat glands, culminating in the brain ordering the glands to shed their drops of moisture.

  My extremities didn’t get cold until the fear had been signalled to my brain and it had given the order to the blood vessels at the surface of my skin to shrink so that the blood left them ready to deal with any possible injury.

  I learnt how images and sounds were transmitted to the brain from the eye and the ear. And how living organisms became bread, an inanimate substance, in the heat of the oven, and how this was then converted to living tissue in the warmth of human insides.

  I learnt that while I slept, part of my brain remained alert and conscious, watching over my heartbeats and whispered breathing and controlling my dream pictures. It saved me from falling out of bed when I flew on the back of a charger up into the sky, or fell through the air and drowned in the roaring ocean. And it woke me up before I wet the bed in fright when a demon of the forest sunk his teeth into my flesh.

  A vast new world opened up before me. At first I was apprehensive, but I soon plunged avidly into it, overwhelmed by a frenzied passion for knowledge. Science revealed the secrets of human existence to me and made nonsense of the huge differences which my mother had tried to construct between me and my brother.

  Science proved to me that women were like men and men like animals. A woman had a heart, a nervous system and a brain exactly like a man’s, and an animal had a heart, a nervous system and a brain exactly like a human being’s. There were no essential differences between them! A woman contained a man inside her and a man concealed a woman in his depths. A woman had male organs, some apparent and some hidden, and a man had female hormones in his blood. Human beings had truncated tails in the form of a few little vertebrae at the base of their spinal columns; and animals shed tears.

  I was delighted by this new world which placed men, women and the animals side by side, and by science which seemed a mighty, just and omniscient god; so I placed my trust in it and embraced its teachings.

  All I could see of him was his little face, his eyes searching desperately for some sign of sympathy and his thin bare arms trembling with cold. His body was completely hidden under hard metal discs with rubber tubes protruding from them, ending in human ears that looked like rabbits’ ears. The stethoscopes were raised momentarily to reveal parts of his bare chest but others quickly came down in their place; some were held in rough, swollen fingers, others in soft hands with red-painted finger nails, and they compressed his childish ribs with the cold metal.

  I heard the professor’s voice saying, ‘Come and listen to these heartbeats.’

  The hands of my fellow students crowding round the sick child pushed me forward and I stood waiting with the stethoscope attached to my ears until a small space became vacant on the thin body. I saw the round red indentation left by the previous instrument; my own swayed uncertainly in my hand and I found it impossible to place it on the inflamed body; my hand began to shake uncontrollably. At that moment I was pushed roughly aside and the crowd of students swep
t me back from the bed. A student wearing thick glasses took my place and jammed his stethoscope unhesitatingly on to the child’s chest as if he hadn’t seen the angry circle there. A feeble complaint broke from the child’s dry lips and went unheard in the noisy crowd competing for a place around his sickbed.

  I suppressed an urge to scream at the top of my voice and my hands struggled against my reason in an attempt to break free and tear these harsh fingers holding the stethoscope away from the child’s chest. But I stood there with my mouth shut and my hands still; for my reason remained alert and strong and true to science; and the god of science is mighty and merciless…

  He stood in front of me with his bare legs twisted and covered in thick hair. He looked at me in protest: ‘Shall I take off my underpants too?’

  The professor looked back at him coldly and unrelentingly and ordered, ‘Take off all your clothes!’

  The sick man went on looking at me in consternation and hesitantly took hold of the waistband of his pants. Allowing him no respite, the professor strode forward and pulled them down, leaving the man stark naked before us.

  I put on the sterile gloves and advanced towards him. He fidgeted in embarrassment and irritation… How could a woman make him undress and then examine him? He tried hard to back away but the professor slapped his face hard, after which he submitted to my probing fingers as if he were a corpse.