A Daughter of Isis: The Autobiography of Nawal El Saadawi. Translated By Sherif Hetata. New York: St. Martins Press, 1999. 294pp. Cloth $55.00; Paper $19.95.

Autobiography has long been the site of scholarly discussion especially as more personal modes of narrative have taken on historical and political importance. Recent controversies over the autobiographical writings of Rigoberta Menchu and Edward W. Said challenge the veracity of their stories and mark this genre as a site of struggle over social and political authority. Nawal el Saadawi has already been attacked and imprisoned in an attempt to quell her authoritative voice. Her autobiography, A Daughter of Isis, may provoke similar responses. She has challenged Egyptian neo colonial policy, self-serving gender norms, and conservative interpretations of Islam. She writes, "The written word for me became an act of rebellion against injustice exercised in the name of religion, or morals, or love" (p.292). Her presence on a fundamentalist death list forced her to leave Egypt for the United States, where the majority of this book was written.

In a spiraling style reminiscent of much of her fiction, el Saadawi depicts the sights, sounds, and smells of her early life. Mixing her contemporary experiences with those of her Egyptian youth, A Daughter of Isis recalls the formative life of one of Egypt's foremost writers. El Saadawi is well known as a physician, novelist, and writer of essays. The candor with which she has approached health, economic, and social problems has landed her in jail and driven her into exile. She writes, "My crime has been to think, to feel. But writing for me is like breathing in the air of life, it cannot stop" (p. 34). Although many of her other works have addressed parts of her personal life, this is her first real foray into the genre of autobiography. She writes "Perhaps in some ways autobiography is more real, more true than fiction, more creative, and more steeped in art. Autobiography seeks to reveal the self, what is hidden inside, just as it tries to see the other" (p. 293).

Much of el Saadawi's writing reveals incidents in her personal life and there has been considerable speculation about the extent to which her novel, Memoirs of a Woman Doctor, is autobiographical. Like Huda Shaarawi's memoir, Harem Years, el Saadawi speaks in ways that lead up to but fall short of many direct personal revelations. What is very beautiful about her fictional style can occasionally be frustrating in this autobiography. She alludes to early sexual experience, but never comes back to it. Perhaps the answer is implicit in the beginning of the book where she remarks that: "Memory is never complete. There are always parts of it that time has amputated. Writing is a way of retrieving them, of bringing the missing parts back to it. Of making it more holistic. Reality is something that changes all the time, something I cannot pin down or express in words on paper" (p. 9). Both the works are wonderfully suggestive, but sometimes do not achieve the candor we find in other works.

Her early life is told beautifully and is peopled with characters interesting for their moral courage and unusual views of life. El Saadawi's academic excellence saved her from suitors, and a life of domestic drudgery. As Sittil Hajja says, ".... the miserable life of a peasant does not change. Education is the sweetest of all things. It opens the door to a job in the government and helps a man to become full in his clothes" (p. 72). When her father faltered in his support for her studies, her mother, Zaynab, helped by saying she didn't need her assistance in domestic tasks. Her father and mother come to respect her achievements as a thinker and doctor. In turn the young el Saadawi is very aware that her mother's sacrifices, love, and support allow her to continue at school. Her father's view that "politics is a game without principals" reflects the many difficulties of the colonial situation. His integrity as a man opposed to corruption, one who refuses to be a party man, gives the young el Saadawi a model of thinking independently. But she is well aware of how her gender forms her place in society even as she transcends its most common expectations.

In A Daughter of Isis, reflections of el Saadawi's early life in Egypt are framed by her exile in Carolina. As is the case with much of her fiction, this is a particularly engaging style. It keeps bringing the reader full circle in her life and creates an anticipation regarding the things which will drive her from her homeland. The book foreshadows her coming traumas but, except in a brief afterword, it does not deliver the stories of those later times. Although the book contains pictures of her as a rural doctor, at the first meeting of the Egyptian Women Writer's Association, with her children and current husband, these people and events are only mentioned. The events of the actual account stop with her still in Al-Mashraha School of Medicine. She leaves us at a point where she is not very formed as a person, where her desires to be a good woman, law abiding, and a good Muslim, clash with her desire for closer involvement with the revolutionary forces driving out the vestiges of colonial power. The very interesting ways in which she eventually integrates her personal, intellectual life and her politics are missing from this volume, since she stops her story prior to the synthesis. For those of us who respect her mature positions, it is disappointing not to hear more of their origins. She reflects on the choice to focus on her earliest life in the afterword, "the years I had written about where very important in the direction that my later life took" (p. 290). Still it is a very wonderful life story, and especially in the beginning, beautifully written. The English translation contains explanatory references to historical material, words, and concepts with which the European reader might not be familiar.

Kathleen J. Wininger
Department of Philosophy
University of Southern Maine