Egyptian writer, physician, and psychiatrist Nawal El-Saadawi was born in 1931 in the rural village of Kafar Talha to a family of middle-class origins. Saadawi was amongst a minority of women who were able to receive an education contrary to the traditional customs of rural Egyptian society that restricted female access to education – a restriction legitimised by religious and neo-colonial delusion.  As a result of this gender-imposed limitation and the relative privilege extended to Saadawi by her family, she was able to observe the paradoxical dichotomies of society’s injustice first-hand. Shortly after graduating from the University of Cairo with a medical qualification in 1955, El-Saadawi rose to become Egypt’s Director General for Public Health Education. Her knowledge and expertise on health and psychology intersected with her perpetual desire to creatively incentivise change, and to do more than just antagonistically fight systems from within. She then published her first book Women and Sex in 1972, an event which led to her officiated “downfall” by the status quo. Shortly after, she was dismissed from her position as Director General and embraced writing as the sole means of resistance and change. Scrutiny by the public would constantly accompany Saadawi in the years to follow as her work gained more attention. Saadawi’s career shift, as well as her genre shift from writing nonfiction to fiction is best understood in a question posed by the writer: “Can I have the passion and knowledge required to change the powerful oppressive system of family and government without being creative?”  Saadawi’s deconstructive works of fiction persisted with the same intellectual rigour of her nonfiction work, now all the more articulated with her belief that for one to be creative, one must also be a dissent. 

In El-Saadawi’s Two Women in Women One, the protagonist Bahiah Shahen is an eighteen-year-old medical student who is groomed by her father to follow his career path. Bahiah lives alienated from her body and desires, incapable of reconciling the two contradicting Bahiah(s) that dwell within her. The outward Bahia adheres to the societal expectations imposed on her but internally she struggles to fully understand herself as the image of obedient daughter and hardworking student. El-Saadawi writes: “Ever since she [Bahiah] first became aware of life, she wondered why all the things she loved were taboos.”, ” her father hated her drawings. Let him see her take a sheet of paper and he would tear it to shreds or crumple it up and throw it out with the household rubbish” To Bahiah’s father, the drawings represent a potential deviation in Bahiah’s tailored future as a hopeful culmination of his expectations. Her drawings, a source of concern to both Bahia and her father, must remain hidden at all times beneath her bedsheets. Even though Bahiah is able to understand herself clearer through creative expression, it is the journey of a self-discovery itself that frightens her into conformity. As a university student, Bahiah begins to see in her male classmates, her blue-eyed professor, her female colleagues, even strangers in the street different manifestations of patriarch, of her father, of looming eyes. She is at a crossroads between confronting an existential dilemma and her double life. Outwardly, she dares not to defy and disrupt society’s impositions on her body and mind, but inside her second construction lies a Bahiah who is sensual and expressive, a Bahia suffocated by compartmentalisation. Bahia decides to pursue art secretly and is featured in a university funded exhibition, where she meets Saleem. The encounter with Saleem manages to propel Bahiah away from her alienation. She finds in Saleem undisputable similarities to herself -notably his dark eyes and the way he walks. Bahia becomes more confronted by herself due to the encounter and engages in a sexual relationship with Saleem. By allowing herself to act solely on account of her own subjective desire, Bahiah sheds part of her primary construction. This is not on its own, was not Bahaih’s happy ending. Nor was she an emancipatory conquest for Saleem to romanticize. She still remains at odds with herself, frightened all the more with the person she is coming to discover. The novel’s pace erratically picks pace after this event. Bahaih finds herself suddenly invested in politics and the national movement. She then attends her first demonstration turned bloodbath. She goes off track, she rebels, she engages in activities that place her within a close proximity to danger, but she is all the more alive and herself because of it. The character of Bahiah resists, struggles. And maybe within her multitude of  constructed narratives, Bahia engages in escapism as a means to go  back to herself. In an interview conducted by The Cairo Review, Saadawi says: “All creative works help to open the minds and illuminate oppressed women and men, as well as, assist in raising their consciousness, and therefore they organize and struggle together to liberate themselves from all types of prisons. Most of my heroines are fighters in different ways”.

Two Women In One, shows us the process of becoming “Othered”, of living with a clear discrepancy between who you are and what society wants you to be. Women are generally expected to perform femininity in a way that panders to patriarchal structures, or else they are casted into the abyss of social exclusion and passive aggressive scrutiny. Aspiring to achieve freedom from domination in the future requires an understanding of complexity – of our own complexity. To not suppress the daunting task of deconstruction, to refuse accepting premature deconditioning and to revolt against passivity. To revolt against one’s seemingly existential stipulation to receive, accept and live according to the constitution of others. Paradoxically, this pursuit towards authenticity does not come without its repercussions. Saadawi Opens Two Women In One with a quotation, saying: “ To all young men and women, that they may realise, before it is too late that the path of love is not strewn with roses, that when flowers first bloom in the sun they are assaulted by swarms of bees that suck their tender petals, and that if they do not fight back they will be destroyed. But if they resist, if they turn their tender petals into sharp protruding thorns, they can survive among hungry bees.”

References: 

Infed.org. 2021. Nawal El Saadawi – a creative and dissident life – infed.org:. [online] Available at: <https://infed.org/mobi/nawal-el-saadawi-a-creative-and-dissident-life/> [Accessed 4 March 2021].

The Cairo Review of Global Affairs. 2021. “My principle is to unveil the mind”. [online] Available at: <https://www.thecairoreview.com/q-a/my-principle-is-to-unveil-the-mind/> [Accessed 4 March 2021].

Featured image: Cover of Two Women in One book cover.