Earl G. Ingersoll, SUNY College at Brockport
The writing of Nawal El Saadawi [1] reminds readers that not all "democracies" of what we used to be comfortable calling the "free world" are quite as respectful of civil liberties as we often naively assume them to be. Saadawi was trained first as a physician and later as a psychiatrist - something of a professional feat for an Egyptian woman a generation ago, given the restrictions on women's rights in the Arab world, even in a more "liberal" state such as Egypt. Eventually, she rose to become Egypt's Director of Public Health, but then she was summarily fired, in large part because of her outspokenness as an advocate of women's rights. In addition, she had begun to make increasingly frank assertions about human sexuality, especially in her book Women and Sex (1972), a study of the status of Arab women and their aspirations for freedom. In 1981, she and hundreds of other Egyptian intellectuals were imprisoned by Anwar Sadat, a political hero in the West for his pioneering efforts to achieve peace in the Middle East. Subsequently, Saadawi's works have been banned in Egypt. Saadawi's feminism does not restrict itself to the "content" of a narrative such as The Fall of the Imam; [2] however, it soon becomes clear that the very "form" of her fiction, in its subversion of traditional plot structure, is implicated in a more subtle variety of feminist project.
In the preface to The Fall of the Imam, Saadawi explains that the text comes out of her experience in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East during a period of ten years before the novel appeared in 1987. She speaks of her many conversations with victims of Arab culture, such as the Iranian woman whose "little girl" was raped by her jailers, and the Sudanese woman who accompanied Saadawi on a visit to the "Association for People with Amputated Hands," where she saw many of those who had been punished under Muslim law, called "Shariat." Confronting the horrors of what men can do to men, but also what they can do to women and children, Saadawi constructed a fantasy narrative of a girl called Bint Allah, who is stoned to death for fornication, as well as crimes against God and the State - God and the State being virtually synonymous with those in power. The decision to employ fantasy as the means of representing the horrors of a repressive State entailed some risk for Saadawi in her efforts at bearing witness to atrocities against women. Saadawi is working in a context similar to the modus operandi of other fantasists who have dealt with the "unspeakable." Art Spiegelman in Maus (1986) and Jane Yolen in The Devil's Arithmetic (1988) come immediately to mind. As a fantasist, she could easily be misread as offering a form of artistic "play" in response to an oppression of women that makes Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1986) seem mild in contrast. [3] Whether contemporary writers are right in attempting to represent the horrors of the Holocaust or not, Elie Wiesel's pronouncements cannot be easily ignored when he warns that any attempt to represent atrocity is to engage in a morally abhorrent activity.
The Fall of the Imam is likely to prove problematic for most readers; at the same time, the novel's plot is intrinsic to this narrative's subversive - one might add, "feminist" - impulses. Bint Allah, "Daughter of God," is apparently pursued again and again by agents of the Imam who apparently shoot her or stone her to death for claiming that she is either Allah's daughter or the Imam's. The segment of the narrative that focuses upon the Imam and his relationship with his inner circle seems to move forward in a more traditionally linear fashion, even though it is uncertain whether the Imam is indeed assassinated. More central to the narrative, however, is the recurring pursuit and killing of Bint Allah.
Even this brief and truncated rendition of Saadawi's novel should suggest the problematic nature of her narrative structure. [4] The traditional structure of narrative, from which Saadawi is clearly departing, is nowhere more brilliantly explored than in Peter Brooks's contribution to contemporary narratology. In Reading for the Plot, [5] Brooks argues for the displacement of old-fashioned amateur psychoanalysis of fictional characters, or of the authors who created them, by what might be characterized as a psychoanalysis of the narrative text. Brooks grounds his theorizing about narrative in the Freud of Beyond the Pleasure Principle and in Lacan's preoccupation with language. Brooks adopts Freud's conception of the death instinct as the impulse drawing the human subject toward quiescence. That quiescence of death is a return to a state similar to the one from which the subject was aroused into life by the tension of desire. Narrative is a similar teasing of its listener/reader into a desire for the end because ending alone can offer "meaning." Like subjectivity, or "life," narrative represents a longing for the quiescence following the last word, a repetition of the quiescence before the first word is heard/read.
Brooks finds corroboration for his conception of ending of narrative in Walter Benjamin's linking of death and narrative closure. Benjamin asserts that "Death is the sanction of everything the storyteller can tell" [6] because it is only death, or an ending, that can affirm meaning. In a similar vein, Brooks notes Sartre's claim that as a young man he had no sense of how to live his life until he decided to live in a manner which might make him what he wanted to be at the moment of death. Sartre proclaimed: "I became my own obituary." [7] Thus, the ending takes on an overriding importance in this context, and Brooks argues that an interminable narrative, or even a narrative that merely stops without closure, cannot have "meaning."
Narrative, Brooks argues, is energized by a "textual erotics." Like the reader, the text is the site of a dynamic tension of competing desires. The first desire is for the end, because it is the ending that transforms plot into meaning. We read in anticipation of the ending because the ending transforms all that precedes it, giving readers that "moment of truth," or "epiphany," an epistemological equivalent of the revelation of the "whodunit." The opposite of that powerful longing for the end is the desire to forestall the ending, or "climax," because the ending is after all the "death" of narrative. Timing is everything: waiting too long for the end exhausts desire; on the other hand, "reading the last page" is for Brooks a "short-circuiting" of narrative desire, a premature arrival at the "climax."
Not surprisingly, the inscription of male sexuality in the narrative paradigm that Brooks posits has not gone unnoticed by feminist contributors to this field of narratology. A case in point is the film theorist Teresa de Lauretis. [8] Because she is writing in the same year as Brooks, de Lauretis depends upon a somewhat earlier theorizing about narrative desire. She cites the structuralist critic Robert Scholes, who writes: "what connects fiction with sex is the fundamental orgastic rhythm of tumescence and detumescence, of tension and resolution, of intensification to the point of climax and consummation. In the sophisticated forms of fiction, as in the sophisticated practice of sex, much of the arts consists of delaying climax within the framework of desire in order to prolong the pleasurable act itself." [9] De Lauretis continues with the wry response: "Those of us who know no art of delaying climax or, reading, feel no incipient tumescence, may well be barred from the pleasure of this 'full fictional act'; nor may we profit from the rhythm method by which it is attained." [10] Once she has artfully exposed the masculinist self-absorption in expounding on a paradigm for all narrative grounded in the rhythm of male sexuality, de Lauretis begins to map narrative structures and strategies that might be seen as alternatives to what I have chosen to call the Male Narrative Paradigm.
The theorizing of de Lauretis has been influenced by the Soviet semiotician Jurij Lotman, whose interest in the origin of myths as cultural texts supports her project of exploring alternative narrative strategies. Lotman examines the "exclusively cyclical-temporal movement" in these texts as they are "synchronized with the cyclical process of the seasons." As de Lauretis phrases it, Lotman generalizes: "Because linear-temporal categories, such as beginning and end, are not pertinent to the type of text thus generated, human life is not seen as enclosed between birth and death, but as a recurrent, self-repeating cycle which can be told starting at any point." [11] The opposite of this cyclical pattern is the one readers have come to expect in narrative: a structure grounded not in enduring "laws" but in the anomalous or eccentric "story." She continues: "And it is the latter which, organized according to a linear, temporal succession of events, generated oral tales about incidents, calamities, crimes, chance occurrences - in short, anything contravening, or in excess of, the mythically established order of things." [12] It is impossible not to hear in the structuralist Lotman's notion of "cyclical-temporal" and "linear-temporal" time structures an echo of the semiotician Julia Kristeva's gendering of antithetical "times." In her essay "Women's Time," [13] for example, Kristeva argues for "repetition and eternity" as central to "female subjectivity," just as by implication "linear time" might be engendered "male."
These engenderings of "times" and their associated narrative structures provide, then, a valuable framework within which to read The Fall of the Imam. Clearly, Saadawi's narrative is working against the Male Narrative Paradigm with its grounding in linearity. Her narrative is implicated, instead, in the "emancipatory strategies" [14] Marianne Hirsch speaks of in her study The Mother/Daughter Plot. Hirsch finds these "emancipatory strategies" in "the revisions of endings, beginnings, patterns of progression" in women's writing. In place of the "retard, postponement" or the "deferral" central to the Male Narrative Paradigm, as it is enunciated by Scholes, Brooks, and other male theorists, these strategies provide what Hirsch terms "continued opposition, interruption, and contradiction." [15]
Thus, it becomes clear that Saadawi's approach to narrative is closer to these "feminine" "emancipatory strategies" explored by de Lauretis and Hirsch. Indeed, Fedwa Malti-Douglas, who has written of Bint Allah's and the Imam's dying, points out: "Each death is repeated obsessively throughout the novel in a complex cyclical pattern." [16] Furthermore, as we have seen, Saadawi's narrative is bent upon "continued opposition, interruption, and contradiction." As de Lauretis and others have written, these theorizings about "emancipatory strategies" are meant to be explorations, or subversions of the traditional male paradigm; they are not intended as efforts at defining what might be termed a Female Narrative Paradigm. Indeed, inherent in these explorations is the recognition that attempts at defining, categorizing, and delineating may themselves be masculinist, and efforts at seeking a single binary opposite to the male paradigm may end by replicating masculinist self-entrapment. Here, "The Laugh of the Medusa" by Hélène Cixous offers a valuable perspective. Writing of écriture féminine, Cixous asserts: "It is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing, and this is an impossibility that will remain, for this practice can never be theorized, enclosed, coded - which doesn't mean it doesn't exist. But it will always surpass the discourse that regulates the phallocentric system... It will be conceived of only by subjects who are breakers of automatisms, by peripheral figures no authority can ever subjugate." [17]
The Fall of the Imam may well be a "difficult" narrative not only because of the indeterminacy of the story it tells, but also because it is an expression of one variety of such "feminine writing." That indeterminacy is evident from the very beginning. When I say that Bint Allah is "apparently" being stoned to death, it is because the text makes it impossible to ascertain what exactly has happened to the novel's central consciousness, even though Bint Allah, this "daughter of God," as she blasphemously calls herself, functions as part-time narrator of this strange tale. The narrative moves through a maze of uncertainties and contradictions.
The novel begins with an event that is repeated again and again, the "night of the Big Feast," the night Bint Allah died, making the narrative a series of recurrent nightmares of flight, capture, and death. The narrative voice asks her persecutors: "Why do you always let the criminal go free and punish the victim? I am young. My mother died a virgin and so will I." They reply: "You are the child of sin and your mother was stoned to death," to which she in turn replies: "I am Bint Allah [Allah's daughter]. That's what they called me in the orphanage." When they persist, saying that her mother "died an infidel," that she is "burning in hell," Bint Allah enrages them by adding: "My father is the Imam." Described as a "religious leader and ruler, representative of God on earth," the Imam is beyond reproach. [18] Her persecutors scream: "May your tongue be cut out of your head" (1), and the very next paragraph seems to carry out their sentence, for it begins: "They cut out her tongue first. Later came the rest. For the Imam ruled according to the laws of God's Shariat. Stone adulterous women to death. Cut off the hands of those who commit a theft. Slash out the tongues of those who spread rumours about irradiated milk" (1 - 2). Readers are left to wonder what to make of this "her." How can a first-person narrator "tell" her story if her tongue has been cut out at the very beginning? Is the "her" being referred to here Bint Allah, or is it her mother? If so, how would the narrator know what happened, since she was a mere infant when her mother was killed in a similar manner? Or, as we come increasingly to suspect, is the object of this brutality any woman whose body is the site of persecution?
The apparently intentional strategy of unsettling the reader's expectations continues, and in the next paragraph but one, the narrative switches yet again: "It was her turn to be free, but the spies of the Imam spotted her as she slipped out, trying to escape in time. They saw her running in the black of the night with her dog close behind her. It was just before dawn. She had almost given them the slip when something struck her in the back. As she fell, the question echoed in her mind: Why do you let the criminal go free, and kill the victim?" (2). Given that this question has already been asked by the novel's "I," the narrative has shifted in this first chapter of barely two pages from the first-person narrative of Bint Allah to a third-person narrative within which she is now positioned as object - as the narrated, rather than the narrator.
Thus, Saadawi offers a narrative in which there are segments of consciousness or voice arranged along a continuum between author and reader, with a center in which a third-person narrator is sharing the responsibility of telling the story with a first-person narrator/point of view character. Moving toward the center of the continuum with a Saadawi who functions outside this text, there is another Saadawi, or consciousness/voice, for this text alone. Often that voice merges with the central consciousness of Bint Allah, so that Saadawi's voice is also Bint Allah's, and readers are offered the sense of this "character" Bint Allah as a vehicle for mediating between author and reader. In this easing of the dark outlines of Bint Allah's "character," the narrative can also move back and forth between the author and reader, with less sense that the two are mutually exclusive. This narrative strategy - quite similar to Virginia Woolf's method in Mrs. Dalloway (1925) - erases the sharp boundaries that we normally expect in a text, boundaries upon which the traditional reader has depended to posit the logical categories grounding an illusion of mastery. In one sense, the narrative is deconstructing the conventional binary of first-person narrative and third-person narrative to produce a narrative site in which the "either/or" of third- or first-person narrative has been supplanted by the "both/and" of first-person alternating with third-person narrative.
Similarly, Bint Allah is the "Daughter of God" and also the child of the Imam, or perhaps some other earthly father who is less holy - or more holy? - than the Imam, or "representative of God on earth." As narrator within the text, Bint Allah repeats what Saadawi herself has written in the preface, that is, a text before or outside this text: children are able to see the face of God in their dreams, and the face they see is that of their fathers. Bint Allah's mother is both a virgin and a mother, she tells us, just as Bint Allah herself claims to be. Once again, Bint Allah has borne another like herself, a child of God and of the Imam as well. Bint Allah is her mother's only child, yet she speaks of a sister and a brother, an issue easily resolved when we discover they are foster siblings. These apparent contradictions persist in Bint Allah's stories of the two faces of God: one is like her mother's, while the other is like the face of Baba, who punished and may have even raped her in the orphanage.
Following this paradigmatic first chapter, the narrative continues to deconstruct conventional assumptions. The identity of this recurring "she" is seldom certain, except when the text refers to Bint Allah's dog Marzouk, who accompanies her in martyrdom. Marzouk is important to Bint Allah, for she believes the dog was a "witness," supporting her belief/self-delusion that the Imam is her father. She believes that the dog took a chunk out the seat of the Imam's trousers when he was leaving the scene of Bint Allah's conception. This narrative gesture, reminiscent of popular art forms such as comic strips and animated cartoons, threatens to diminish the seriousness of the issues at stake. At the same time, having been led to believe that Bint Allah has been stoned to death, readers learn that "the bullet struck her in the back" (4). Later in the same paragraph, readers learn that "Her dead body was turned to stone, became a statue of rock living on year after year with her dog by her side" (5).
Furthermore, once the narrative has lulled readers into a false sense of security that they are confronting a recognizably coherent narrative strategy of shifting between first- and third-person narrators, the text unexpectedly undermines expectations once again. In the seventh chapter, entitled "Chief of Security," the narrative exposes Bint Allah as the object of the Imam's gaze as well as the Chief of Security's. In addition, the dark glasses of the Chief of Security take on magical attributes, allowing him to "pierce the disguise of the Imam slipping out of a prostitute's house" (24). Then the text further decenters narrative expectations by beginning the fourth paragraph of the chapter "Chief of Security" with the assertion "I was standing in the first row." This "I" refers to "my dark glasses," confirming that the narrative has shifted, even if ever so briefly, to the Imam's Chief of Security.
The pattern replicates itself in the next chapter, entitled "Allah is on the Side of the Imam." When this chapter begins "I heard the sound of gunshots ringing in my ears" (31), the logical assumption is that Bint Allah is the "I" who hears. However, the narrative has done the unthinkable: it has authorized the voice of the Imam himself, the very embodiment of evil, who may in fact be dead, if those "gunshots" have found their target.
Allah has also visited the dreams of the Imam, and Allah has the face of the Imam's father. In a dream, Allah jabs the boy Imam with a sword which he is obliged to take up against those who would disobey the Imam's commands in the future, and the boy awakens back in the world of his father, who has sold the family's possessions to raise the money he needs to make his pilgrimage to Mecca, where his sins may be washed away. The boy's mother has no money, but then, to borrow the title of a Saadawi short story, "She Has No Place in Paradise" [19] anyway. The future Imam promises to return when he has made his fortune, but somehow or other the Imam who the boy subsequently becomes never has the time for sentimental journeys, especially back to the squalor of his childhood. Saadawi's strategy is apt here: Evil is not Satan; it has a familiar face, perhaps even a familial face.
The "fall," or death, of the Imam is rendered even more problematic by his strategy of doubling himself for protection. To thwart assassination attempts, he has commissioned a replica of his face to be worn as a mask by one of his body-guards. Thus, the narrative never definitively establishes whether it was the Imam or his decoy whose "fall" is played out over and over, like Bint Allah's murder. The impression of eternal repetition establishes the inescapable conclusion that evil persists, regardless of the face it presents to the unending succession of its victims, the Bint Allahs of Saadawi's and the reader's world.
In these ways, Saadawi offers a feminist fantasy narrative which disturbs its readers not only because it painfully reminds them of the brutal oppression of women, but also because it undermines a complex of constructions that feminists for almost two decades now have been announcing as "masculinist." As fantasy, The Fall of the Imam subverts the logic of realist narrative, and by extension the "reality" such narrative often naively presumes itself to be representing. It problematizes narrative point of view by continuously undermining the reader's illusion of mastery that it is possible to determine from one chapter to another, or even from paragraph to the next, who is telling the story and how this narrative can be penetrating the consciousness of so many disparate characters. It violates the conventional notion of a discrete "self" - implicit in speaking of literary "characters" - by transgressing the boundaries of life and death, producing a text "spoken" by one who is not dead but is dying - over and over again. Thus, Saadawi's narrative is implicated in the subversion of the logic of linear time, replacing it with a time of eternal recurrence. Here a Bint Allah may speak without a tongue and in her mute speaking may embrace all those being stoned to death. Nawal El Saadawi qualifies, then, as one of Cixous's "breakers of automatisms," one of those "peripheral figures no authority can ever subjugate."
Endnotes
[1]
The author's name is also written as Nawal el-Saadawi and Nawal al-Sa'dawi.
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[2]
El Saadawi, The Fall of the Imam, trans. Sherif Hetata (London: Methuen, 1988). Subsequent references are to this Minerva softbound edition and are cited in
parentheses in the text.
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[3]
In her book Men, Women, and God(s): Nawal El Saadawi and Arab Feminist Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), Fedwa
Malti-Douglas also speaks of Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale in the context of a discussion of The Fall of Imam. So does Hilary
Mantel in her review of The Fall of Imamk, which appeared in the Daily Telegraph, judging by the Mantel blurb on the back of the
softcover edition of this novel.
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[4]
Malti-Douglas speaks of Imam as "a metafictional postmodern novel." "Summarizing," she asserts, "would mean
weaving a plot when one does not exist." (91).
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[5]
Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Knopf, 1984).
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[6]
Quoted in Brooks 22.
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[7]
Quoted in Brooks 22.
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[8]
Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).
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[9]
Quoted in de Lauretis 108.
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[10]
de Lauretis 108.
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[11]
de Lauretis 116-17.
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[12]
de Lauretis 118.
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[13]
Julia Kristeva, "Woman's Time," The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).
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[14]
Hirsch borrows the term from the subtitle of Patricia Yaeger's Honey-Mad Women: Emancipatory Strategies in Women's Writing (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987)
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[15]
Marianne Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narratives, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989) 102.
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[16]
Malti-Douglas 92.
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[17]
Hélène Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa," New French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivon (New York: Schocken, 1981) 254.
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[18]
In her interview with George Lerner, entitled "Nawal el-Saadawi: 'To us, women's liberation is the unveiling of the mind',"
The Progressive, April 1992, 32-35, Saadawi indicates that the Imam may be "Sadat, Khomeini, Reagan, Bush, Kennedy, or anyone who uses God and politics" (34).
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[19]
Nawal El Saadawi, She Has No Place in Paradise, trans. Shirley Eber (London: Methuen, 1987).
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