God Dies by the Nile and Other Novels

by Nawal El Saadawi

  The simple phrase ‘only blood can wipe out shame’, which links a corporal element, blood, to a social element, shame, is one so embedded in Arabo–Islamic culture that it takes on an enormous importance, as it is transformed and shortened to ‘honour killing’.

  Fedwa Malti-Douglas

  Martha C. Kraft Professor, Indiana University

  AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION

  Among the novels I have written, The Circling Song is one of the closest to my heart. I wrote it at the end of 1973 – in November, I’m quite sure – when I was going through a period marked by an enigmatic, internal sadness. Egypt’s ruler at that time was extremely pleased with, and proud of, his victories; he was surrounded by a large entourage of men, and some women, all of whom applauded him for whatever reason, and perhaps without any reason.

  It was not clear to me what the principal source of my melancholy was, but there certainly were some external reasons that contributed: being deprived of my position and summarily dismissed from my job the year before (in August 1972) because of some of my published writings; the confiscation of my books and articles; and the inclusion of my name on the government’s blacklist. Meanwhile, every morning I saw the face of Egypt’s ruler printed on newspaper and magazine pages, and I could hear his voice reverberating from various loudspeakers.

  No affiliation or contact linked me with politics or the ruling establishment, or with the ruler. I was writing all the time, and carrying on my medical practice on a part-time basis. But a relationship of sorts developed between the ruler and me (from one side, of course); it was an association based on hatred. I had not experienced hatred before in that way: at the time, most of my relationships were ones built on affection.

  From time to time, I visited my village, Kafr Tahla. There I would feel a sense of relief and relaxation as I sat in my father’s very modest old house, which was almost bare of furnishings. I would smell the fragrance of its dirt floor, newly sprinkled by my cousin Zaynab to keep the dust down. I would see the faces of the children, both girls and boys, looking like flowers just as they open, covered with flies as bees cover a blossom. I would hear them singing as they played atop the dung heaps.

  One of their songs was ‘Hamida had a baby…’ I used to hear them frequently as they sang it, and I had heard it many times before as a child, as one of them. I don’t know why, when I heard them singing it this particular time, the song inspired me with the idea behind this novel.

  The idea was vague and cryptic, and profound; it kept me from sleeping for several days, or perhaps weeks. Then I began to write. Carrying my papers inside a cloth tote bag and wearing my leather sandals – since they had flexible, rubber-like soles – I would leave my house on Murad Street in Giza, just across the river from Cairo. It would take me about half an hour to traverse Nile Street, cross the Cairo University Bridge, and reach my destination: a small, outdoor garden café by the Nile, since demolished to make way for the Fire Department. Seated on a bamboo chair, a little bamboo table before me, I would gaze at the waters of the Nile and write.

  I wrote the first draft of the novel in a few weeks, and rewrote it in a few days. As I wrote certain sections, I could feel the tears on my face. When Hamida (or Hamido) felt tears, I felt my own. I was sure that my novel would amount to something, for as long as I was crying real tears along with the characters of the novel, then surely this work was artistically alive, and would have a similar effect on those who read it.

  Whenever I heard the microphones and broadcasts bellowing out their joyous songs, my sadness would grow. I didn’t know which of the two emotions held more reality: the joy of the world around me, or the sadness inside. I felt that this world and I were utterly incompatible, and the novel was simply an attempt to give that incompatibility concrete form.

  I couldn’t publish this novel in Egypt, of course, since I was on the government’s blacklist. So I tried to publish it in Beirut. At that time, Beirut was like a lung which gave many writers – men and women prohibited from publishing – the ability to breathe.

  Dar al-Adab published the novel in Beirut two or three years – I don’t remember exactly – after I had written it. In Egypt, naturally, the critics ignored it. Perhaps they even avoided reading it, for this was the treatment they had consistently given my other books. Thus, the novel came out in an atmosphere of silence, and it has lived in the same silence to the present. But people did read it, because the publisher in Beirut reprinted it more than once, and because one of the publishers in Egypt also has published it several times (since 1982). But the critics in Egypt maintained their silence, while the novel continued to be published and read in Egypt as well as in other Arab countries.

  Meanwhile, I had forgotten this novel completely and had written other novels in a very different style. Yet the characteristics and structure of this particular novel lived on in my imagination, like a dream that one has once had. I wanted to write another, perhaps a more ambitious novel that would draw upon the same way of writing. And from time to time I would meet a woman or man who had read it, or receive a letter from a reader – sometimes a woman, sometimes a man – making a comment about this novel along the lines of ‘This little book has released so many of my innermost feelings! Why don’t you always write in this style?’

  But every idea has its own particular mode of expression, and I made no attempt to impose this style on different thoughts or ideas.

  One day when I was in London, the publisher of this novel asked me if I had a new novel which could be translated and published. I don’t know why this particular work came to mind immediately – this novel which had been published in Arabic for the first time more than a decade before in Beirut. I realized that I was very fond of The Circling Song, and that it was like the sort of close relationship which one does not forget no matter how many years pass. I hadn’t read the novel for ten years, as I don’t like to read my books after they are published, but the translator of this novel gave me a copy of the translation for me to review. The strangest thing happened: it seemed as if I were reading it for the first time. I would stop at certain sections, surprised, as if the writer were another woman, someone other than me. Indeed – and how peculiar this seemed – I felt actual tears coming whenever Hamida (or Hamido) cried. And this is how I knew that the translation was as I wished it to be.

  Nawal El Saadawi

  Every day, and at whatever time I left the house, my gaze was met by a ring of little bodies, winding round and round, circling continuously before my eyes. The children’s thin, high-pitched voices spiralled palpably up into the sky. The rhythmic orbit of their singing was synchronized with the movement of their bodies, fused into a single song, comprising one stanza which repeated itself in a never-ending, unbroken cycle, as they turned round and round, and round:

  Hamida had a baby,

  She named him Abd el-Samad,*

  She left him by the canal bed,

  The kite swooped down and snatched off his head!

  Shoo! Shoo! Away with you!

  O kite, O monkey snout!

  Hamida had a baby,

  She named him Abd el-Samad,

  She left him by the canal bed,

  The kite swooped down and snatched off his head!

  Shoo! Shoo! Away with you!

  O kite, O monkey snout!

  Hamida had a baby,

  She named him Abd el-Samad…

  The children would repeat the song, so rapidly that the first line sounded before the echo of the last had died down, and the last line seemed to follow fast on the tail of the first. Because they were circling and singing uninterruptedly, it was impossible to pick out the song’s beginning or end by ear. And since they were grasping each other tightly by the hand as children are wont to do, one could not tell by looking where the circle began and where it ended.

  * * *

  But everything does have a beginning, and so if I am to tell this story I must begin. Yet I do not know the starting point of my tale.
I am unable to define it precisely, for the beginning is not a point that stands out clearly. In fact, there is no beginning, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the beginning and the end are adjoined in a single, looping strand; where that thread starts and where it ends can be discerned only with great difficulty.

  Here lies the difficulty of all beginnings, especially the beginning of a true story, of a story as truthful as truth itself, and as exact in its finest details as exactitude itself. Such exactitude requires of the author that he or she neither omit nor neglect a single point. For, in the Arabic language, even one point – a single dot – can completely change the essence of a word. Male becomes female because of a single dash or dot. Similarly, in Arabic the difference between ‘husband’ and ‘mule’, or between ‘promise’ and ‘scoundrel’, is no more than a single dot placed over a single form, an addition which transforms one letter into another.

  So I must begin my story at a well-defined point. And a well-defined point is just that and nothing else. It cannot be a dash or a circle, for instance, but rather must be a real point in the full geometrical sense of the word. In other words, scientific accuracy is unavoidable in this work of art which is my novel. But scientific accuracy can corrupt or distort a work of art. Yet perhaps that corruption or distortion is exactly what I want, and what I aim for in this story. Only then will it be as truthful, sincere and real as ‘living life’. This is an expression upon which I insist; I write it deliberately, with premeditation: it is not a haphazard or accidental choice. For there are two kinds of life: ‘living life’ and ‘dead life’. ‘Dead life’ is that which inhabits a person who walks through life without sweating or urinating, and from whose body no foul substance emanates. For foulness, corruption and rot are necessary corollaries of ‘living life’. A living person cannot hold back the urine in his bladder indefinitely or he will die. Once he is dead, though, he can keep his foulness bottled up inside. He then becomes what might be called a ‘clean corpse’, in a scientific sense. From an artistic point of view, however, inner corruption is more deadly than foulness which is allowed to escape into the world outside. This is a well-known fact or phenomenon of nature, and it is for this reason that the smell of a dead body is much more foul than the odour of a body which is still alive.

  * * *

  I fancied (and my fancy, at that particular moment, amounted to fact) that one of the children who were circling round as they sang in unison suddenly moved outside of the circle. I saw the small body come loose from the steadily revolving ring, breaking the regularity of its outline. It moved off like a gleaming speck, or a star that has lost its eternal equilibrium, detached itself from the universe, and shot off at random, creating a trail of flame, like a shooting star just before it is consumed in its own fire.

  With an instinctive curiosity, I followed his movement with my gaze. He came to a stop so near to where I stood that I could see his face. It wasn’t the face of a boy, as I had thought. No, it was the face of a little girl. But I wasn’t absolutely certain, for children’s faces – like those of old people – are sexless. It is in that phase between childhood and old age that gender must declare itself more openly.

  The face – oddly enough – was not strange to me. So familiar was it, in fact, that it left me feeling bemused, and then my surprise turned to disbelief. My mind could not accept the sight before my eyes. It is just not plausible that, leaving home in the morning to go to work, on the way I should run head-on into another person only to discover that the face which met my gaze was none other than my own.

  I confess that my body shook, and I was seized by a violent panic which paralysed my ability to think. Even so, I wondered: why should a person panic when he sees himself face to face? Was it the extreme weirdness of the situation in which I found myself, or was it the almost overwhelming familiarity of the encounter? At such a moment, one finds everything becoming utterly confused. Contradictory or incompatible things come to resemble each other so closely that they become almost identical. Black becomes white, and white turns to black. And the meaning of all this? One faces, with open eyes, the fact that one is blind.

  I rubbed my eyes with trembling fingers, and looked at the child’s face again, and again, any number of times. Perhaps I have been gazing into that face ever since. Maybe I am still looking at it, at this very moment, and at every moment, as if it is following me around as closely as my shadow, or clinging to me like a part of my body, like my own arm or leg.

  * * *

  Panic, by its nature, breeds loathing, and I cannot deny that I felt an instant hatred for this face. Some people might think I’m not speaking sincerely when I say this. Perhaps they will ask themselves how one can loathe his own face, or body, or any part of his body. No doubt those people have a point – after all, they’re more able to see me than I am able to see myself. This is not a unique or personal tragedy: in fact, everyone suffers from it, for one is always most visible to others – whether frontally, in profile, or from the rear. While others know what we look like from behind, we can only look ourselves in the face – and that by means of a mirror.

  The mirror is always at hand, positioned like another person standing between one and oneself. Even so, I have no animosity towards the mirror. As a matter of fact, I am practically in love with it. I adore gazing into it at length – staring into it, actually. I love to see my face. The truth is that I never tire of looking at my face, for it’s a beautiful face, more beautiful than any other face I’ve ever seen on this earth. Moreover, every time I look at it, I discover new aspects of its beauty that almost bewitch me.

  Not everyone will feel ill at ease with my frankness. But candour is not always welcome; in fact, it is rarely so. Nevertheless, I have promised myself to tell the truth. Speaking candidly is hard work, I know, and persisting in it requires ever-greater efforts and more and more sacrifices. One must give up trying to be attractive or acceptable at every moment; one must even accept that people may find a certain degree of ugliness in what we are or in what we say and do. Sometimes they may find us so ugly that we become repulsive to them. But this is the struggle demanded of freedom fighters, and also of anyone who wants to produce a good work of art, which is what I am trying to do.

  What particularly dazzled me about this face were the eyes, and the eyes alone. Eyes are what I adore in a person most of all. And I believe (although my conviction may lack scientific foundation) that the eyes of a person are extremely sensitive organs, that in fact they are the most sensitive of all, followed closely (and this is natural) by the reproductive organs. But what drew me most to the eyes was a certain light that seemed to shine in all directions, reflecting itself in all nooks and crannies, like the purest of fine-cut diamonds. It was certainly a confusing gaze, one that defied easy appraisal, for it wasn’t a one-dimensional look with a clear meaning. It wasn’t a look of sadness, or an expression of joy, a look of reproach or of fear. No, it was not a single look. It was a look composed of many looks, even if on the surface it seemed uniform. For soon enough the first look disappeared, to be followed by the second and third, each enveloped in turn, like the turning pages of a thick book or the folds of a length of fine weaving, successive layers piling themselves one atop the other.

  My attention was so fully captured by the eyes that I noticed no other features of her face – neither nose, nor cheeks, nor lips – nor did I notice the tiny hand which rose in the air, waving to me with a gentle and familiar gesture as though she had known me all along.

  ‘What’s your name?’ I asked her.

  ‘Hamida.’

  The voices of the children rose in unison, accompanied by their winding movement and circular song, circling ceaselessly so that one could not tell the beginning from the end.

  Hamida had a baby,

  She named him Abd el-Samad,

  She left him by the canal bed,

  The kite swooped down and snatched off his head!

  Shoo! Shoo! Away with you!


  O kite! O monkey snout!

  Hamida had a baby

  I laughed, as adults normally do when they are trying to be playful with children.

  ‘Are they singing for you?’ I asked.

  But I got no answer. She had vanished during the brief moment when my head moved as I laughed. I just barely caught a glimpse of her small back, bending slightly as she disappeared inside a dark wooden door on which was mounted a wooden human hand that served as a door knocker.

  I didn’t bother with the door knocker, as strangers to a household usually do when they are facing a closed door. I knew my way, despite the massed darkness that always squats in the entrances to these houses, a gloom made even heavier by the sun’s setting long before. To my right, I saw the nanny-goat’s head peeping out from behind the wall; to my left was a small step leading into a room, merely a slight elevation. Still, as I crossed it, I stumbled – just as I have every time – and almost fell on my face. I would have done, had it not been for my body’s practised agility and its remarkable ability to regain a threatened balance.

  I spotted her. She was lying on the reed mat, deep in sleep. Her eyelids were half closed, and her lips were parted just enough to let through the deep breaths of a sleeping child. Her arms were coiled around her head, and her right hand was closed over a penny or perhaps a halfpenny coin. Her long galabeya* was hitched up over her thin, tender-skinned legs as far as the knees, and her little head quivered in a minute, hardly perceptible movement. Her small jaws were pressed lightly together, giving the impression of bliss dissolving in her mouth: a piece of candy, concealed beneath her tongue.