Bibliography
Nov. 14th, 2011 09:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_lady_lilyWoman at Point Zero - Nawal El-Sadawi
You may have come across Nawal El-Sadawi's name during the Arab Spring uprising; she is a very vocal feminist activist in Egypt, one of the grand dammes of the movement now. I first came across her name in Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing, but it's taken me this long to read her. Brum, thankfully, seems to have a lot of her books, so I've currently got three of them out of the library.
Her writing is taut, stretched thin, economical, and yet lyrical and hypnotic. Woman at Point Zero is about a woman who works her way through the cycle of social un/respectability and ultimately realises that there is no hope for her and her autonomy outside of relationships with men - and that, if that is the case, she would rather kill and be free than pretend to be free. It doesn't pull punches, or pretend that the reality of female life is any less horrific than it is. Actually, that's one of the most poignant things about this book - its account of a woman's life and experience, unglossed, unrepetent, eyes cast up rather than down. It is the life still lived by plenty of women today - and that, too, is frightening.
Read her. Just - read her.
You may have come across Nawal El-Sadawi's name during the Arab Spring uprising; she is a very vocal feminist activist in Egypt, one of the grand dammes of the movement now. I first came across her name in Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing, but it's taken me this long to read her. Brum, thankfully, seems to have a lot of her books, so I've currently got three of them out of the library.
Her writing is taut, stretched thin, economical, and yet lyrical and hypnotic. Woman at Point Zero is about a woman who works her way through the cycle of social un/respectability and ultimately realises that there is no hope for her and her autonomy outside of relationships with men - and that, if that is the case, she would rather kill and be free than pretend to be free. It doesn't pull punches, or pretend that the reality of female life is any less horrific than it is. Actually, that's one of the most poignant things about this book - its account of a woman's life and experience, unglossed, unrepetent, eyes cast up rather than down. It is the life still lived by plenty of women today - and that, too, is frightening.
Read her. Just - read her.
