Zed Books is reissuing Nawal El Saadawi’s classic feminist work. It was first published in Arabic in 1975 and in English in 1983, translated by Sherif Hetata. Forty years on it feels just as fresh, powerful and necessary as on the first day it appeared. Firdaus is on death row for murder. Proud and unbroken, in spite of a life of unremitting pain and repeated betrayals, she narrates her story to a female psychiatrist on the eve of her hanging. The text has a highly visual quality, it’s an expressionist film in words: disembodied eyes loom over Firdaus at key moments in her life, representing intense emotion – fear, love. Genitally mutilated as a child, Firdaus feels sexual desire as a distant memory, something once glimpsed, now only vaguely remembered. The searing narrative is rendered epic by the use of long repeated passages that make explicit the connections between the stages in Firdaus’s journey towards murder. As a first-person account, the book initially seems narrow in focus, but it builds to an all-encompassing and blood-curdling indictment of patriarchal society.
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