A Daughter of Isis: An Autobiography of Nawal El Saadawi.

• Author: Jaber, Nabila
• Position: Statistical Data Included - Review

Nawal El Saadawi, A Daughter of Isis: An Autobiography of Nawal El Saadawi. London and New York: Zed Books Ltd, 1999. 294 pages. Hardcover $55.00.

SEEKING A TEMPORARY RESPITE from death threats back home and agonizing over living a status of exile in North Carolina, the author takes up the project of writing her autobiography as a way to make sense of her existence. Now over 60 years old Saadawi engages in the process of self-reflection while consciously challenges her representation of "self-life-text" against time and memory. "Rediscovering the past" is fused with the present, adding a layer of uncertainty and complexity to the life she seeks to retrieve/undo. How she perceives the past and what discourses she draws upon are in themselves revealing, particularly, in the light of her longstanding political activism and commitment to issues of gender equity.

Saadawi's autobiography is a journey back to the 1940s and covers her childhood and early adulthood in her country of origin, Egypt. Defiant and proud, the narrative of self conveys a sense of empowerment and agency. "Daughter of Isis", a Goddess figure whom Saadawi admires and imaginatively inhabits, symbolizes a role model, embodying power/resistance duality in achieving an autonomous self. Indeed, the author's constructed self-image, "freedom fighter," aptly reflects her numerous struggles against social injustices and other forms of social constraints, including the power of language and discourses that legitimate oppressive practices in religion, culture and politics. The power of language in constructing us is revealed by exploring how words that signify "love and justice... shift meanings as we grow older" (p. 15). The very same words become "a sword over my head, a veil over my mind and face" (p. 16). This autobiography carries the early signs of Saadawi's numerous struggles for emancipation and demo cracy as expressed in both spoken and written words.

The text uncovers a social world as inhabited and consumed by the author's experiences and critical observations of what it is like to grow up in a society strictly regulated by patriarchal order and structured around hierarchical divisions based on gender, rigid social status, and class. Questions of race/color, national identity/belonging, displacement and colonialism are also among the running themes considered. Throughout the text gender, sexuality, class and race are figured prominently as they constitute Saadawi's subjective...