The Egyptian feminist writer and doctor Nawal El Saadawi always spoke her mind. Her early books were explosive testimonials, based on her medical practice and personal experience, about sexual double standards and the abuses women faced because of them. She went on to write many more books, including novels, plays and several memoirs. Over the course of her life she was jailed, censored, fired, admired, and attacked by Islamists as an unbeliever. She is still one of the best-known and most translated Arab women writers.

Some of the books discussed in this episode include: The Hidden Face of Eve, The Fall of the Imam, Memoirs from the Women’s Prison, Woman at Point Zero, Daughter of Isis and Walking Through Fire.

Ursula wrote about El Saadawy recently for The New York Review of Books.

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In this episode from a few years ago, we wandered through Arabic poetry and prose and talked about many different forms of literary love: regretful love, unreciprocated love, bad love, vengeful love, liberating love, married love.

We read this poem by Núra al-Hawshán:

“O eyes, pour me the clearest, freshest tears

And when the fresh part’s over, pour me the dregs.

O eyes, gaze at his harvest and guard it.

Keep watch upon his water-camels, look at his well.

If he passes me on the road

I can’t speak to him.

O God, such affliction

And utter calamity!

Whoever desires us

We scorn to desire,

And whom we desire

Feeble fate does not deliver.”

The Núra al-Hawshán poem, translated by Moneera al-Ghadeer, has a modern musical adaptation on YouTube produced by Majed Al Esa.

Yasmine Seale’s translation of Ulayya Bint El Mahdi. This poem and others were set to music on the album “Medieval Femme.”

Do’a al-Karawan (“The Nightingale’s Prayer”) by Taha Hussein

I Do Not Sleep, Ihsan Abdel Kouddous, trans. Jonathan Smolin

The Cairo Trilogy, Naguib Mahfouz (1956-57)

Al-Bab al-Maftouh (The Open Door) Latifa al-Zayyat, trans. Marilyn Booth (1960)

All That I Want to Forget, by Bothayna Al-Essa, translated by Michele Henjum.

Rita and the Rifle, Mahmoud Darwish, made into a song by Marcel Khalife.

Ode to My Husband, Who Brings the Music by Zeina Hashem Beck

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Egypt’s January 25 revolution was 15 years ago. Since then many of its young leaders have been persecuted and the history of what happened distorted or denied. After spending over a decade in prison, the activist and writer Alaa Abd El-Fattah was finally released from prison in September, and allowed to travel outside Egypt in December. We are re-running an episode we did about Alaa’s 2021 book You Have Not Yet Been Defeated, and other writing on the Egyptian uprising and its aftermath.

Show Notes

Alaa Abd El-Fattah’s You Have Not Yet Been Defeated was translated by a collective, and is out from Fizcarraldo Editions in the UK. A US edition is forthcoming in March 2022 from Seven Stories Press. There is also an Italian translation by Monica Ruocco.

Ahmed Douma’s second poetry collection, Curly, was set for release in September 2021 by Dar Maraya. But on the eve of its publication, state security officials confiscated copies of the book. Read Elliott Colla and Ahmed Hassan’s co-translations of a poem from this collection, and an excerpt from Douma’s “Blasphemy,” on ArabLit.

Basma Abdelaziz’s Here is a Body, which chronicles the Rabaa massacre and its aftermath, was published in Jonathan Wright’s translation by Hoopoe Fiction. You can read an excerpt on the Hoopoe website.

Also, join our #bulaqbookquiz for a chance to win a release from one of ten participating publishers. Send your answers to bulaq@sowt.com.

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