“Perhaps this was because I lived in a country where many prominent intellectuals around me had spent various periods of time in prison for ‘political offences,'” including her own husband. While conducting research on neurosis in Egyptian women in the early 1970s, El Saadawi made regular visits to hospitals and outpatient clinics, but she was especially interested in “what prison life was like, especially for women,” she reveals in the book’s 1983 preface. Prison looms large in Woman at Point Zero, considered to be El Saadawi’s best-known novel internationally. The prolific El Saadawi with dozens of title to her name, has written six memoirs thus far she wrote her first from a jail cell on a roll of toilet paper and a smuggled-in eyebrow pencil, aptly published as Memoirs from the Women’s Prison. The Egyptian-born El Saadawi writes in Arabic her husband, Sherif Hatata, who is also a novelist and doctor, has translated a number El Saadawi’s works (and his own) into English. Writer/playwright/activist/psychiatrist Nawal El Saadawi is one of those women who seem to scare men – especially those who purport to have something called ‘authority.’ She’s been fired, banned, accused, threatened, imprisoned because of what is ultimately her simple belief that all women are worthy human beings deserving respect and equality.
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