Bistro Libido (Chimera Short Story Collection)

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The interpretive work of scholars often focuses on the controversial final scene. She argues that his children, John Wesley and June Star, have never been to East Tennessee, and she shows him a news article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about an escaped murderer who calls hi Campbell originally published in in Astounding Stories, and apparently inspired by H.

Wells' article The Man of the Year Million.

Fiction forms

Plot summary The narrator relates his conversation with an oddly dressed man whom he had picked up by the side of the road. The traveler claimed to have been from the year , and to have developed time-travel technology with which he had first traveled 7 million years forward in time. He then overshot on his return trip, landing himself in In the future, man has colonized the solar system but is dying out. Human existence is free of difficulty, as all illness and predators have been eliminated, and all work is done by perfect machines.

Malgudi Days is a collection of short stories by R. Narayan published in by Indian Thought Publications. The book was republished outside India in by Penguin Classics. Each of the stories portrays a facet of life in Malgudi. It's an art we need to study and revive. In , the project was revived with film-maker Kavitha Lankesh replacing the late Shankar Nag as director. The new series was telecast from April 26, on Doordarshan. Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected is a collection of sixteen short stories written by British author Roald Dahl and first published in All of the stories were earlier published in various magazines, and then in the collections Someone Like You and Kiss Kiss.

Tales of the Unexpected. The first seven stories in this book are from Someone Like You, It was written in and published in in her short story collection Everything That Rises Must Converge. O'Connor finished the collection during her final battle with lupus. She died in , just before her final book was published. A devout Roman Catholic, O'Connor often used religious themes in her work. May owns a farm on which she hires Mr.

Greenleaf to work because her sons are not interested in farm work. To her dismay, both live at home and are unmarried. One sells insurance to African Americans while the other is a scholar and teacher at a university. Greenleaf, consider themselves Christians. May, however, has a somewhat smug morality based upon outward success, while Mrs. Greenleaf secretly practices faith healing and recognizes herself as a sinner.

When no one is nearby, Mrs. Greenleaf prays aloud that Jesus "stab her in the heart," implying that she must change her sinfu Later on in , Lovecraft wrote the short story "The Haunter of the Dark" as a sequel and dedicated it to Bloch. Eventually, in , Bloch wrote his own sequel "The Shadow from the Steeple". His earliest efforts at the craft are woefully inadequate and rejected by magazine editors.

As a result, he begins to yearn after the forbidden knowledge known only to those who are true practitioners of the occult, and begins sending letters of correspondence to various thinkers and dr It is alluded to in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater as one of Kilgore Trout's stories. Plot summary In the not-so-distant future, a criminal mastermind named Billy the Poet is on the loose and on his way to Cape Cod. His goal is to deflower one of the hostesses at the Ethical Suicide Parlor in Hyannis.

The world government runs the parlors and urges people to commit suicide to help keep the population of 17 billion stable. It also requires that the hostesses at these establishments be virgins on the basis that this makes the idea of suicide more appealing, especially to middle-aged and older men. This drug is called "ethical birth control," and was originally developed by a d Roald Dahl in Roald Dahl short stories bibliography is a comprehensive annotated list of short stories written by Roald Dahl.

Billy Martin born May 25, , known professionally as Poppy Z. Brite, is an American author. He initially achieved notoriety in the gothic horror genre of literature in the early s by publishing a string of successful novels and short story collections. His later work moved into the genre of dark comedy, with many stories set in the New Orleans restaurant world.

Martin's novels are typically standalone books but may feature recurring characters from previous novels and short stories. Much of his work features openly bisexual and gay characters. Work Martin is best known for writing gothic and horror novels and short stories. His trademarks include featuring gay men as main characters, graphic sexual descriptions, and an often wry treatment of gruesome events.

Some of Martin's better known novels include Lost Souls , Drawing Blood , and the controversial serial killer novel Exquisite Corpse ; he has also released the short fiction collections Wormwood originally published as Swamp Plot summary The story opens with the unnamed narrator recounting a summer sea voyage from Charleston, South Carolina to New York City aboard the ship Independence.

The narrator learns that his old college friend Cornelius Wyatt is aboard with his wife and two sisters, though he has reserved three state-rooms. After conjecturing the extra room was for a servant or extra baggage, he learns his friend has brought on board an oblong pine box: Even so, he presumes his friend has acquired an especially valuable copy of The Last Supper. The box, the narrator is surprised to learn, shares the state-room with Wyatt and his wife, while the second room is shared by the two sisters.

For several nights, the narrator witnesses his friend's surprisingly unattr Plot The protagonist of the story is Maddie Pace, a timid and indecisive young woman who lives on a small island named Gennesault or "Jenny" , off the coast of Maine. Maddie is both pregnant and a widow, having recently lost her husband in a fishing boat accident.

After a scattering of initial outbreaks, dead bodies all over the world begin to reanimate en masse and attack the living. The source of the phenomenon is eventually traced to "Star Wormwood", a bizarre alien construct orbiting above the ozone layer at the Earth's south pole. A space shuttle under joint American-Chinese authority visits the site and promptly meets with disaster. Jenny's inhabitants gather up all the It was published after Russo received the Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls hence gained considerable attention and many, mostly favorable reviews.

In her writing she tells her life story, ill-treated by the nuns at the Belgian Convent School where she is brought up and where she was branded 'the whore's child'. He visits the artists community on Monhegan Island accompanied by his latest girlfriend Beth, in search of the artist whom he has realized was his wife's lover.

The book is a collection of short stories published posthumously in the United Kingdom by Jonathan Cape on 23 June The book originally contained just two stories, "Octopussy" and "The Living Daylights", with subsequent editions also carrying firstly "The Property of a Lady" and then " in New York".

The stories were first published in different publications, with "Octopussy" first serialised in the Daily Express in October The two original stories, "Octopussy" and "The Living Daylights", were both adapted for publication in comic strip format in the Daily Express It was reprinted in Kureishi's collection of short stories, Love in a Blue Time, and also as a supplement to some editions of The Black Album. The short story was also adapted into a film of the same title.

Plot summary The narrative deals with the problems of Parvez, who has migrated to England with his son Ali. Parvez worries because Ali's behaviour has changed significantly.

Early in the story, Parvez is afraid of discussing his worries with his friends because his son has always been a kind of showpiece son. Eventually, Parvez breaks his silence and tells them how his son has changed, hoping to receive some advice. After having a short conversation, they come to the conclusion that his son might be addicted to drugs and that he sells his things to earn money to buy drugs.

Short stories by Jorge Luis Borges

After this meeting, Parvez goes to his taxi to drive home. But in his car he finds Bettina, a prostitute, who drives with Par First serialised in three installments in Charles Dickens' popular magazine Household Words,[1] The Poor Clare is a gothic ghost story[2] about a young woman unwittingly cursed by her own grandmother.

Plot The Poor Clare is narrated by an unnamed young lawyer from London, reflecting on the "extraordinary incidents" which he experienced in his youth. The story proper begins several decades before. Accompanying them is their Irish Catholic servant, Madam Starkey's former nurse, Bridget FitzGerald and her daughter Mary, who take up a small cottage in the grounds of the manor.

Bridget comes to exercise great control over the household. Some years later, due in part to an increasingly fractious relationship with her mother, Mary FitzGerald leaves Starkey Manor to take up a position on the Continent. Racked with grief at her d Flash fiction is a fictional work of extreme brevity[1] that still offers character and plot development. Identified varieties, many of them defined by word count, include the six-word story,[2] the character story also known as "twitterature"[3] , the "dribble" also known as the "minisaga"; 50 words ,[2] the "drabble" also known as "microfiction"; words ,[2] "sudden fiction" words ,[4] flash fiction 1, words , nanotale,[5] and "micro-story".

In the United States, early forms of flash fiction can be found in the 19th century, notably in the figures of Walt Joe Rivers eventually retired from boxing and became an ice deliveryperson in El Paso. The workers are locked out, and the federal troops are sent against them. Rivera escapes the massacre by climbing over the bodies of the deceased—including those of his mother and father.

He makes his way to El The Commonwealth Short Story Prize is awarded annually for the best piece of unpublished short fiction 2, to 5, words. The prize is open to Commonwealth citizens aged 18 and over. The Commonwealth Short Story Prize is managed by Commonwealth Writers, the cultural initiative of the Commonwealth Foundation, which was set up in to inspire, develop and connect writers and storytellers across the Commonwealth. The prize aims to bring writing from these countries to the attention of an international audience. The stories need to be in English, but can be translated from other languages.

Plot summary In order to eliminate local crime, a town council signs a contract with a demon, intending that the demon devour anyone who breaks the law after 11pm. Reception The Science Fiction Research Association called the story "outstanding", and said that by selecting the story to be published in The Year's Best Horror Stories and thereby bringing Egan's work to a wider audience, editor Karl Wagner could "be credited with at least one major 'discovery'.

The story elucidates Bukowski's publicly acknowledged artistic debt to Ernest Hemingway, the writer who had the most influence on American writers of Bukowksi's generation. Like "The Killers", Bukowski's story of the same name has as its thematic trope Murder in a nihilistic universe. Unlike Hemingway, the killers actually accomplish their act in the time-frame of the story. Bukowski's authorial point of view in his version of "The Killers" also is influenced by Hemingway, as he it be seen as a logical outgrowth of the attitude expressed by Hemingway's fictional alter-ego Nick Adams at the end of the "Killers": Commonwealth Foundation presented a number of prizes between and The main award was called the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and was composed of two prizes: In addition the Commonwealth Short Story Competition was awarded from to Beginning in , Commonwealth Foundation discontinued its previous awards and created a new cultural initiative called Commonwealth Writers, which offered two new awards: After two years, the Book Prize was discontinued.

Look up stranger in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. The Stranger or Stranger may refer to: Desiree Ross born May 27, is an American actress. Life and career Ross was born and grew up in Columbia, South Carolina. Redeployment is a collection of short stories by American writer Phil Klay. Background The book comprises twelve stories that chronicle the experiences of soldiers and veterans who served during the Iraq War, specifically Operation Iraqi Freedom — Klay served in the United States Marine Corps from to He thought it important to study what the greatest minds had to say about war.

It made its first appearance in the July issue of Venture Science Fiction. Synopsis The old men speak of a time many years ago when hundreds of starships were visible in the nighttime sky, but now the world is old, poor and forgotten. It seems that the men are scholars who have heard of the great crown that Raud is charged with keeping, and they wish to see it. Its original copyright belongs to H.

Plot The story takes place at a diner in the warm deserts of Arizona. The protagonist, Rohaizad, walks through the desert thinking about his love, Azah. He arrives at a diner in which the cook and his daughter, the waitress, were alone. Later on, after Rohaizad gets his food, two well-dressed men, Rinong and his commander, come into the diner. Unexpectedly, the two men pull out guns, not to rob the place but to quiet the people and prepare them for what is about to happen. They explain that there would shortly be a man coming to the diner, to find a car that will take him to his destination but the car will not be there.

Rinong and his commander will be instead. A teenager from Nottingham is convicted for robbing a bakery and sent to borstal where he finds solace in long distance running. Ernest Brown the upholsterer was lonely. Suffering from shell-shock he feels guilty that he survived the trenches of World War I. His wife has left him and he has lost touch with his family. Then one morning whilst in a cafe two young girls sit at his table, disrupting his routine of introspection.

He speaks to them and buys them cakes. In the weeks that follow he meets them regularly, buying them food and gifts; they give him a reason to live and become the children he never had. Then the police, tell him not to meet them again and he turns to drink. Sillitoe based the title character on a relative of his, Uncle Edgar also an upholsterer warned off by police from meeting two young girls he had befriende Film adaptation A feature-film adaptation entitled Torture Ship, directed by Victor Halperin, was released in Archived from the original on In the Year is an short story published under the name of Jules Verne, but now believed to be mainly the work of his son Michel Verne, based on his father's ideas.

In any event, many of the topics in the article echo Verne's ideas. Clarke, first published in in the magazine Startling Stories. The two-part story speculates on the cooling of the Sun as a doomsday scenario for Earth and an evolutionary advent for Venus. Plot summary The first part of the story is told from the perspective of a tribe of nomadic humans in a future where Earth has entered a final ice age. The tribe is travelling toward the equator ahead of glaciers that are descending from the North Pole, but discovers, when they arrive in the last hospitable region of the planet, that glaciers from the South Pole have already almost reached them.

The tribe carries with it a few relics from the midst century which it considers sacred, although the functions of the various objects have been forgotten. Before the ultimate extinction of the human species, the relics are safely relocated to a mountain that stands between the two advancing bodies of ice. The second part of the story is told f Elizabeth Short July 29, — January 14 or 15, , known posthumously as the "Black Dahlia", was an American woman who was found murdered in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, California.

Her case became highly publicized due to the graphic nature of the crime, which included her corpse having been mutilated and bisected at the waist. A native of Boston, Short spent her early life in Massachusetts and Florida before relocating to California, where her father lived. It is commonly held that Short was an aspiring actress, though she had no known acting credits or jobs during her time in Los Angeles. She would acquire the nickname of the Black Dahlia posthumously after the owner of a drugstore in Long Beach, California told reporters that male customers had that name for her , as newspapers of the period often nicknamed particularly lurid crimes; the term may have originated from a film noir murder mystery, The Blue Dahlia, released in April After the discovery of her body on January Lovecraft, written in and first published in the amateur publication Pine Cones in October Internal illustration from the pulp magazine Weird Tales March , vol.

An intern in a mental hospital relates his experience with Joe Slater, an inmate who died at the facility a few weeks after being confined as a criminally insane murderer. He describes Slater as a "typical denizen of the Catskill Mountain region, who corresponds exactly with the 'white trash' of the South", for whom "laws and morals are nonexistent" and whose "general mental status is probably below that of any other native American people". Although Slater's crime was exceedingly brutal and unprovoked he had an "absurd appearance of harmless stupidity" and the doctors guessed his age at about forty.

During the third night of his confinement, Slater had the f In the South short story. The South short story topic "The South" original Spanish title: Member feedback about The South short story: Short story topic A short story is a piece of prose fiction that typically can be read in one sitting and focuses on a self-contained incident or series of linked incidents, with the intent of evoking a "single effect" or mood, however there are many exceptions to this.

Member feedback about Short story: Fiction forms Revolvy Brain revolvybrain. In the South short story topic In the South is a work of fiction by Salman Rushdie looking at the meaning of 'a life well lived' from the points of view of two old men with very different personalities. Member feedback about The Suit short story: Short stories Revolvy Brain revolvybrain. Member feedback about The Lottery: Horror short stories Revolvy Brain revolvybrain. The Road Not Taken short story topic "The Road Not Taken" is a short story by Harry Turtledove, set in , in which he presents a fictitious account of a first encounter between humanity and an alien race, the Roxolani.

Member feedback about The Road Not Taken short story: Works originally published in Analog Science Fi Member feedback about South of No North short story collection: When his colleagues complimented him on a short story his wife had published, he presented her with an ultimatum: But such a step should not surprise anyone who knows Nawal El Saadawi.

The demons of writing inhabited her even as a child. In the half-century since she penned that childhood story, El Saadawi has imposed herself on the world literary scene. No other Arab woman and few Arab men approaches El Saadawi in the breadth of her writing. Nor has the Egyptian feminist ever shied away from controversial subjects. Her political activities continued when she became a university student. Yet despite her strong and unswerving allegiances to political causes, including that of the Palestinians, Nawal El Saadawi has never joined a political party.

For a Middle Eastern intellectual, this absence of overt political allegiance might seem inconsistent. It is also clear by now that the expulsion of the foreigner freed Algerian women to move from the battlefield to the kitchen, and this under a leftist, modernizing, anti-imperialist, FLN government. Similar gender dynamics have appeared in the Palestinian struggle, which was until recently a consensus issue among Arabs worldwide. Nawal El Saadawi has often been questioned about political priorities.

After the expulsion of the foreigner, or after the revolution or, for some, after the creation of the Islamic society , we will be able to sit down and work out these vestigial problems among ourselves. Without an attack on gender oppression, she argues, no lasting blows can be delivered against the other citadels of injustice. The fiery nature of many of these discussions is rendered even more explosive by other political and religious developments in the region, such as the rise of the Islamist movement. Nawal El Saadawi, by inserting religion into many of her recent textual creations, has placed herself in the heart of the fray.

All these debates have one thing in common: El Saadawi becomes in this view, despite her consistent opposition to Western imperialism an opposition that her critics usually manage to avoid recalling , objectively a tool of Western imperialism. At the very least she can be labeled an outsider. How convenient it is symbolically to expel from the tribe the person one does not wish to hear. Thus, many object that through her writings Nawal El Saadawi is giving the Arabs a bad name read: In this view, even critics who discuss the Saadawian corpus are guilty, since they give exposure—and maybe even credence—to her positions.

These arguments seek to force the discussion of Arab women whether by Arabs or by non-Arabs into a rigid and politically loaded binarism: A pernicious label has even begun to be attached to such critical assessments: El Saadawi has more confidence in the cultural and intellectual vitality of her people than that. The message behind these arguments is a simple one: I have talked about the implications of this silencing, an act that is nothing short of censorship, elsewhere.

No one accuses the leftist writer who denounces the upper classes or political despotism of giving the Arabs a bad name. Of course, none of this is meant to suggest that El Saadawi skirts issues of class. As we shall see, class perspectives dynamically inform her gender analyses.

Rather, the point is that El Saadawi treats gender problematics with a directness that is rare, not only in Arabic letters but in mainstream media throughout the world. It is this directness that makes her so threatening. The image-of-the-Arabs-in-the-West argument is but a smokescreen. What really matters is the attack she is waging on values long cherished—and not only in the Middle East. The accusation of stoking anti-Arab fires, however, almost always carries other charges in its wake.

Is not Nawal El Saadawi writing for a Western audience? Any reasonable discussion of the applicability of an intellectual or political ideology in a non-Western context must consider not only feminism but other ideologies and movements as well. The most obvious of these is Marxism. While many Middle Easterners, notably neotraditionalists, reject Marxism as foreign and irrelevant, most of those, both inside and outside the region, who question the applicability of feminism have no objections to applying concepts like class, imperialism, capitalism, and exploitation to Middle Eastern societies.

Gender analyses seem to generate much more intellectual squeamishness than arguments derived from other social problematics. Yet gender consciousness is hardly new to Middle Eastern society. Social, cultural, historical, and legal questions relating to male-female roles, equality of women, and so forth have been part and parcel of Arabo-Islamic discourse for centuries. Nawal El Saadawi has locked her powerful pen on many of the gender obsessions in her own culture and has woven memorable narratives around them. But to seek to exclude feminist perspectives that is, the reality that as groups males dominate females across the planet from particular geopolitical zones—in this case the Arab world, the Middle East, or the world of Islam—is automatically to privilege patriarchal discourses within these zones.

Anti-imperialism can easily become a trap through which nationalism, while seeking to defend the native against the outsider, really defends those in power in the native society. A feminism that is not internationalist will find itself powerless because it will allow nationalisms to be used against the empowerment of women in each separate society.

The problem, however, lies deeper than the sociological specificity of Dr. Rather, it goes to the very heart of the problematic notions of East-versus-West and authenticity. But it is not important whether she was intended in this depiction. For this advertising copy simply articulates in writing what many voices utter in corridors or in closed gatherings: But in fact both our Moroccan author and Nawal El Saadawi are circulating in an international world, one in which the East-West dichotomy is often misleading.

To be sure, both writers begin in a regional context that is linguistically defined. They do this by deciding to write in Arabic. At the same time, they are swiftly drawn, more willingly than not, into a transnational circulation of cultural products. I know of no Arabic author who does not wish to see his or her work translated and integrated into the world literary scene. Anyone who thinks this phenomenon is limited to the secularists—or the leftists, or the Westernized intellectuals—needs but walk into the Islamist bookstores of Paris and London, where one can find loving translations into the languages of the colonizers of the works of the most anti-Western Islamic neotraditionalists.

And this is to say nothing of the Middle Eastern intellectuals whose lives are spent in exile in Western countries, hence partaking of at least two cultures. And what of the many literary genres, such as the novel and the short story, in which non-Western writers like our Moroccan friend indulge—and which likewise are originally Western?

To speak of authenticity in this context is as vain as the tourist search for the authentic, unspoiled site, which ceases to be authentic as soon as the tourist sets foot in it. For there is no authentic modern Arab world or discourse if that means one untainted by Western culture. More important, there is no contemporary intellectual figure, be he or she the most neotraditionalist of Islamic revivalists, whose thought has not been powerfully affected by modern European ideas.

Furthermore, the discourse of authenticity plays two related political roles in the region. The second is a plea for recognition on the part of the budding artist or intellectual who has yet to gain access to the more lucrative international markets. When El Saadawi writes, she does not speak for all Arab women.

Hers is one voice. That does not mean that on a certain level of generality some of her fictional situations do not speak about all Arab women, indeed potentially about all women. Though not all of her work is realistic in the literary sense, her texts are overwhelmingly based on her own direct knowledge and experience. The rich linguistic specificity of these narratives can suffer when they are transposed into another language, such as English. A translation is a new cultural product, one that speaks to new audiences and new cultural concerns. Too often, rather than analyzing this feminist literature, they have acted as if they wished to isolate it from the mainstream of Arabic letters.

Consider, for example, this recent assessment by a Middle East specialist: The Egyptian physician, polemicist and authoress [sic] Nawal al-Saadawi has several works in English translation: In each case these works combine autobiographical references and personal opinions with fictional representations of persons either real or imagined in a radical feminist context with heavily emotional, anti-establishmentarian and anti-Islamic overtones. They are highly controversial in the Arab world.

But still more is at issue. The debate over art and political engagement is an old one. But her writing is not limited to her political engagement. Indeed, its artfulness supports its politics. It is as complex as the Arabo-Islamic heritage that gave it birth. Routledge, , pp. Oxford University Press, , p. Our task here is not to make a catalogue of works that discuss Nawal El Saadawi. It is sufficient to glance at any study on women in the Middle East, both literary and nonliterary, in any language to find her included. State University of New York Press, , pp. Modern Arabic Literature, ed.

Cambridge University Press, , p. See Emmanuel Sivan, Radical Islam: Yale University Press, , p. The later expanded edition of this work solves the problem by eliminating reference to Nawal El Saadawi altogether. A Century of Arab Feminist Writing, ed. Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke London: Indiana University Press, , p. Feminist Engagements with Comparative Literature, ed. Cornell University Press, , p.

See Chapter 5 below. The Coming Challenge, ed. Nahed El Gamal London: Zed Books, , pp. Indiana University Press, The linked issues of nationalism and feminism are also dealt with in Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World London: Temple University Press, contains much relevant information as well. Harvard University Press, , pp. Freda Hussain New York: See, for example, Fatima Mernissi, Beyond the Veil: Schenkman, , pp. Haakon Chevalier New York: Grove Press, , pp. Editions Rochevignes, , inside cover.

Of course, there is nothing sociologically unique or even particularly Islamic in this development. After World War II in the United States, for instance, women who had entered the work force in the national emergency were eased back into more domestic roles. Politics of an Emerging Mass Culture Bloomington: Indiana University Press, , pp. Journal of International Studies 20, no. Perceptions, Realities and Struggles for Liberation, ed. Macmillan, , pp. I have been present at lectures and participated on panels with Dr. El Saadawi on many occasions at which she has enunciated these positions.

Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Beacon Press, , p. University of Texas Press, For a recent attempt to link Orientalism and feminist approaches to the study of Middle Eastern women, see Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism New York: Knopf, , pp. See also Minh-ha T. Trinh, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism Bloomington: Yale University Press, , pp. Many of the studies in Judith Tucker, ed. Old Boundaries, New Frontiers Bloomington: Indiana University Press, deal, on one level or another, with some of these questions.

We shall have ample occasion to see this in many of the chapters below e. This objection has been made orally to me on many occasions by both Arabs and non-Arabs. The negative image of Arabs in the West has been much studied. One of the most interesting works in this regard is that of Jack G. Cornell University Press, , pp. Princeton University Press, An Historical and Critical Introduction Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, , pp.

It would be equally vain to speak of an authentic medieval Arabic culture, if by this one meant one untainted by influences from Greece to Persia. The historic greatness of Arabic culture, indeed, has been its capacity to act as the cosmopolitan vehicle for the integration of diverse civilizational strands. Issa Boullata ; emphasis added. Perhaps because he is not a literary critic, Tarabishi is less concerned with formal generic issues. The most articulate statement on this topic is, again, that of Joanna Russ, How to Suppress.

The struggle between me and my femininity began very early…before my femininity sprouted and before I knew anything about myself, my sex, or my origin…indeed, before I knew what hollow had enclosed me before I was tossed out into this wide world. Thus does Nawal El Saadawi enter the domain of modern Arabic novelists. What about the physician of the title? Medicine and the physician play key roles in the saga of the female protagonist. That social power permits the female to overcome the power of the male. The corporal consciousness is linked to a body knowledge that subverts claims of patriarchal superiority by showing the artificiality of socially created gender distinctions.

The social power and body knowledge thematics give revolutionary force to a novel that might otherwise seem conservative in its general plot structure. After all, this is the story of a protagonist who finds a successful resolution in the context of existing society. But as we shall see in this and subsequent chapters, the social power associated with such happy endings is not available to all women. Several of the most sophisticated and most influential writers of the contemporary Arab world are or have been practicing physicians.

There is a societal reason for this: Further, different branches of the Arab intellectual elite are far closer to one another than is the case in the West more like the situation in nineteenth-century Europe, for example. Much the same phenomenon exists in the fiction of medical practitioners in the West, like Richard Selzer and William Carlos Williams.

But relative to her Western colleagues, the Egyptian feminist doctor makes less of disease and cures, focusing more often on the social role of medicine and the physician. Often, fictional situations that could lead to the medical treatment of physical maladies are resolved without professional intervention.

Edited by Matthew Asprey Gear

If the medical interaction between physician and patient is not the primary concern in these narratives, what is? In fact, the most pervasive function of medicine and the physician in the Saadawian fictional corpus is that of a repository of social power. In Memoirs of a Woman Doctor El Saadawi sets forth the major issues related to medicine and the physician that would dominate the rest of her fictional corpus.

Despite its title and first-person narration, which suggest an autobiographical account especially for those who know that its author is a female medical practitioner , the text nowhere formally presents itself as autobiography. Memoirs of a Woman Doctor is a female Bildungsroman that adopts the fiction of autobiography. These sentiments extend to her female body as well, giving rise to resentment and hatred of its physical peculiarities.

Science appeals to her greatly, but eventually this fascination is transferred to nature, when she moves to a peaceful country village. The accompanying partial resolution permits the hero to make peace with other figures in her life. The first, with an engineer, ends in disaster when he tries to block her career.

The second, with a physician, also fails. Memoirs of a Woman Doctor tells a story of conflict and conquest. The language of its first-person narration is deceptively simple, consisting of short, choppy sentences generously interspersed with ellipses. The ellipses are not without meaning; they signal a hesitation on the part of the narrator, an uncertainty in the process of discovery of self.

To do so, social barriers are broken, ones associated with the body. Biology, we discover, is not destiny for this precocious narrator. As a child, the hero of Memoirs hated …the ugly, limited world of women, from which emanated the odor of garlic and onion. That loathsome word that my mother repeated every day until I hated it…And I never heard it without imagining in front of me a man with a big belly inside of which was a table of food… [13].

My brother cuts his hair and leaves it free, he does not comb it, but as for me, my hair grows longer and longer. My mother combs it twice a day, chains it in braids, and imprisons its ends in ribbons…. My brother wakes up and leaves his bed as it is, but I, I have to make my bed and his as well. My brother goes out in the street to play, without permission from my mother or my father, and returns at any time…but I, I do not go out without permission.

My brother takes a bigger piece of meat than mine, eats quickly, and drinks the soup with an audible sound, yet my mother does not say anything to him…. I am a girl! I must watch my every movement…I must hide my desire for food and so I eat slowly and drink soup without a sound….

Acknowledgments

My brother plays…jumps…turns somersaults…but I, whenever I sit and the dress rides up a centimeter on my thighs, my mother throws a sharp, wounding glance at me. The first object the narrator focuses on is hair: Braids and ribbons are normally external signs of femininity. Perhaps it is not accidental, then, that her first overt act of rebellion should consist in her going to a beauty shop to have her hair cut. Memoirs chronicles three adolescent sexual encounters between the hero and members of the opposite sex.

The first involves a doorkeeper who approaches her when she is sitting on a bench and attempts to explore her sexual parts with his hand. She stands up in terror and runs away. She is asked to meet him, as a matrimonial prospect. When her father announces that she is first in her class, she expects the guest to show some admiration. But all she sees is the man scrutinizing her body, his eyes settling finally on her chest.

She runs from the room, again in terror. They take a walk together and decide to run a race. When she is about to win, however, he pulls her down and tries to kiss her. For a moment, she wishes that he would embrace her fiercely, but when she comes back to her senses she becomes angry and slaps him. These three early encounters display the same dynamics: The first example, with the doorkeeper, is a clear trespass. Normally, in middle-class Egyptian society such an encounter would be viewed as socially licit, or at least free of violation.

The narrator does not experience it that way, though, and so she runs away with the same terror. Hence this encounter must also be understood as an illicit one, representing a physical violation, though one more subtle than that committed by the doorkeeper. In the incident with her cousin, likewise, she interprets his advances as physical transgression, despite her own initial desire. Notwithstanding their varying degrees of social acceptability, these three incidents are all treated in the text as more or less open forms of physical violation, as the exercise of unwanted male sexual power over woman.

The balance of power has shifted. Medicine equals power; in fact, it is this power that motivates the narrator to attend the faculty of medicine in the first place. The submissive domestic existence in the kitchen that must be rejected, the long braided hair that must be cut, the illicit sexual advances that must be countered: Nor is it mere coincidence that all these repudiations occur before the narrator decides to pursue medicine, a career centered on the body.

The body will be the conquered, not the conqueror. These declarations of superiority are social and intellectual: The Faculty of Medicine?! The word has a fearful impression on me…it reminds me of white shining glasses under which are two penetrating eyes moving with amazing speed…and strong tapered fingers holding a sharp frightening long needle…. My mother was trembling in fear and looking at him with supplication and humility…And my brother was shaking from fear…And my father was lying in bed looking at him with imploration and a plea for mercy….

Medicine is a fearful thing…Very fearful…My mother, my brother, and my father look at it with a look of reverence and veneration. I will be a physician then…I will learn medicine…I will put on my face white shining glasses…I will make my eyes under them penetrating, moving with amazing speed. And I will make my fingers strong, tapered. I will hold with them a sharp frightening long needle. I will make my mother tremble in fear and look at me with supplication and humility…And I will make my brother shake in front of me from fear…And I will make my father look at me with imploration and a plea for mercy… [20].

This first exposure to medicine is interesting indeed, for here the science is subsumed in the identity of its practitioner, a male physician. That the physician should be a male may seem logical at first glance. But this gender label has deeper implications. Medicine on the one hand, the traditional world of the mother on the other: What appeals initially to the female narrator of Memoirs is the effect that this man has on her family members: The narrator would have us believe that their trepidation is the direct result of the raw power of the scientist. A closer look reveals, however, that the father is lying in bed.

If so, might not his reaction and that of the mother and brother be related to his infirmity? The narrator is oddly silent here. In asserting her decision to become a physician, the young woman speaks of the effect she will have on her three family members: Their response to the to-be female physician will be identical to those they already displayed to the male physician, but with one major difference. This time, the father is not lying in bed. There is no question about his physical state.

The reason for his reaction and that of the other family members is clear: But what does it mean to be this idolized specialist? The male doctor, when we first meet him, is nothing more than isolated body parts: These body parts, eyes and fingers, are each linked to instruments external to the body, glasses and a needle. When the female supplants him, she is transformed into those identical corporal and noncorporal parts. The eyes and the fingers are highly suggestive. The fingers are holding a long needle, an instrument of penetration.

Power is reduced to its social and male sexual components. And the primary vector of this power is the gaze. The scopic penetrating activity of the physicians operates in a dialectical relationship with the scopic activity of the other family members. Their glance is generated alternately by fear or a desire for mercy. It becomes even more significant when seen in a Middle Eastern context. With this delicate scopic game, Nawal El Saadawi has entered a gender debate, one quite vigorous in the contemporary Islamic world, over the glance. Men looking at women, women looking at men: The debate is a long-standing one in the Arabo-Islamic tradition; its roots go back centuries.

This power, initially the attribute of the male, will become the property of the female through the science of medicine. Medicine will do more for the narrator of Memoirs.

In the South (short story)

The science of the body will help the female protagonist to conquer her own body: In literary Arabic, this word signifies something shameful, defective, and imperfect, the genitals, and something that must be covered. As the signifier for the genitalia, it refers to men as well. But this loaded word also stands for the femininity of the female physician. In this discourse, a physical reality that in itself possesses no necessary moral or social meaning is invested with a moral value.

This investment, in turn, dictates social conclusions. Her entire body takes on the notions of shame and imperfection. Such a generalization is perfectly consistent with traditional Arabo-Islamic values. This narrator is treading on provocative ground. After all, we are still in the domain of the corporal. But nature is equally important for her ultimate liberation, helping to heal her wounds and lead her to a rebirth.

Men, Women and God(s)

After she completes her medical studies, our hero replaces the god of science with that of nature. These actions, now performed with unrestrained physicality, show once again the limitations that a female body traditionally places on its subject. Most important, nature brings about a rebirth: But what an education the narrator receives in medical school! The most powerful manifestation of that education is in the form of cadavers. Medicine through dissection will permit the physical destruction of the two bodies and with them a recasting of many of the issues that earlier plagued the narrator.

There she is in the dissection room in the presence of the two naked bodies. It is as if she were reliving her childhood and reexamining the values that her mother and society tried to instill in her. Even her previous violations will be redefined. Why did my mother place these enormous differences between me and my brother and make of man a deity for whom I had to spend all my life cooking food? Why is society always trying to persuade me that masculinity is a distinction and an honor and femininity a disgrace and weakness?

Is it possible for my mother to believe that I am standing with a naked man in front of me and with a scalpel in my hand with which I will open his stomach and his head? And who is society? Is it not men like my brother whose mother raised him since his childhood as a god? Is it not women like my mother who are weak and useless? How is it possible for these people to believe that there is a woman who knows nothing about man except that he is muscles, arteries, nerves, and bones? One question, inserted among the others, overshadows the rest: But that is only half of it.

The scalpel and the opening of the stomach and the head will reappear in the book like an obsession. That dreadful thing with which mothers frighten their young daughters, so they are consumed by the fire of the kitchen for the sake of his satiation and they dream of his spectral figure night and day! There he is, man, thrown in front of me, naked, ugly, torn to pieces…. I did not imagine that life would disprove my mother to me so quickly…Or would avenge me of man in this way…That dejected man who looked at my breasts one day and saw nothing of my body but them….

Once again, mothers are to blame, for they instill the values of domesticity in their daughters. More than polysemy is involved here, however. From the world of enforced domesticity, woman moves into the domain of religious punishment, from the world of onion and garlic into that of eternal damnation. What a stunning reversal of the earlier discourse of marriage inculcated by the mother! Nonetheless, the narrator has still not had her full revenge. The dead male corpse is made to pay for the illicit acts of the male gender in its entirety. The female corpse, whose inanimate existence is framed by her hair, also has a role to play.

Both in introducing us to this anonymous young woman and in closing the account of the dissection, the narrator focuses on a single body part: It begins the description long and soft and ends it in the pail of the dissection room, together with the other discarded body parts, in a striking narrative trajectory. In between, the narrator moves along the body down from the hair to the white teeth and long, painted fingernails, ending at the chest.

Much like her dead male colleague on the dissection table, the female corpse fulfills more than a medical function. Her breasts are over her chest but they are thin, hanging down…. The two pieces of flesh that tortured me during my childhood…the two that determine the future of girls and occupy the minds and eyes of men….

There they are resting under my scalpel, dried up, wrinkled like two pieces of shoe leather! They move from the dead body to become attached first to the narrator and then to the entirety of women. When they return to the corpse, it is as two desiccated objects resembling shoe leather. From body parts that elicit such admiration on the part of men and society , the breasts join the lower body in a less than flattering image.

The hair is equally eloquent. The power of the hair should come as no surprise. After all, was it not a basis of difference between the narrator and her brother? Part of the power of these dissection room scenes lies in their imagery. But more than language and image are at issue here. In question is the redefinition of societal gender boundaries. The cadavers are unwilling pawns in this morbid game. The identity of sorts between the narrator and the female corpse means that the narrator has died as well. I will never die and become a corpse like these corpses stretched out in front of me on the tables.

It is as if only death could fully exorcise the traumatic experiences of her youth. But this is not just any death. It is death seen through the prism of medicine. The medical universe has once again united the social and the corporal. The process of dissection, along with the rest of the medical school experience, leads the narrator to the conclusion, proven by science, that woman is like man, and man like animals. Yet there is more to medicine in Memoirs than the power of knowledge. Although at first the hero conceives of medicine as science and as an all-powerful deity, she begins to change her mind when she sees one of the physician instructors slap a patient; she now decides that this medicine, at least, lacks compassion.

In fact, medicine is not only the catalyst that redefines childhood experiences in the dissection of the two corpses, for example , but it is also the element that will delimit the adult experiences of the female protagonist. This will be accomplished not by the bodies of the dead, however, but by the bodies of the living, in the form of patients. The first patient the female physician encounters is a young woman afflicted with rheumatism. To add to the complexity of the situation, this patient is pregnant, and we meet her as she is giving birth.

Her fate is doomed, though: The physician finds medicine to be particularly ineffective in helping her to understand this mystery that permits life to emanate from death. Like the pregnant woman, this man has a greater role to play than that of simple patient, the object merely of professional duty. His diseased existence permits the hero to feel pain for the first time in her life. Her outbreak of tears elicits an emotional response from the patient, who tries to reassure her. This role reversal has its function. The sick old man bears a gift for the hero: And as if this were not enough, his smile causes her to become aware of her love for life.

Is it a surprise, then, that medicine and patients become coterminous with the amorous relationships of this woman doctor? Their relationship begins as one of mutual misunderstanding. He has an idea of a woman doctor that, interestingly enough, has some similarity to the first scopic image of a physician the narrator exposed us to: When he asks her a second time if she will marry him, she has a flashback and thinks about the meaning of the word marriage: His surprised reaction elicits this explanation: The union is doomed.

Once locked into the relationship, however, the physician finds her husband urging her to abandon her clinic and her medical career. In the prenuptial stages of the relationship, the man offers more than he is in fact willing to deliver. The woman is lured into what she believes is a relationship of mutual equality; the marriage, however, proves to be the opposite. This is the first part of the archetypal structure. Instead, she leaves her husband and continues her quest. Before the narrator finally meets the right partner, she must have a second negative relationship, this time with another physician and instigated by a man afflicted with cancer.

The couple meet at an official dinner party, where both express an aversion to the traditional trappings of these sorts of gatherings. Again an anxious voice pleads: The young man is in desperate need of a blood transfusion, and the artist goes out to get the blood. He also helps the physician to set up the transfusion. When she urges him to move away from the patient lest he become infected, he replies: He looked at me in silence…And he did not move from his place until I finished setting up the transfusion equipment… [52].

This episode leads to the personal fulfillment of the narrator of Memoirs, a fulfillment that is arrived at neither quickly nor easily. What gives this incident its curative power? This most recent relationship was initiated on nonmedical, neutral ground, at an official dinner party.

The medical emergency surfaces only after the couple have declared their love for each other. But this fact does not necessarily seal the relationship. The patient still has an important role to play. He, in fact, does the driving. And he helps to set up the transfusion, remaining with the doctor until the operation proves successful. Her companion asks her: I sat on a wooden chest next to the patient and injected him with medicine…I prepared the blood transfusion equipment…and determined the blood type… [54]. He goes out and brings blood, the life-giving force. The blood type is irrelevant.

The two will participate equally in this activity of giving life. They will cure the patient and allow him to be reborn. As a couple, they are participating in the activity of birth, albeit metaphorically. We have in a sense come full circle. Here, the couple gives birth, in what is for them a life-giving process. Medicine is at last successful. And if we remember that the momentous phone call occurs in the text directly after their mutual declarations of love, after the couple has formed itself, then childbirth seems the logical next step.

It is only because the doctor is able to overcome her obsession with medicine as power that she is also able to transcend her focus on the male-female power struggle and come to terms with both her femininity and medicine. This last is now science and art, reason and compassion. One of the interesting elements in the system outlined by the narrative is that while the female physician-heroes integrate these two aspects of medicine, the male physicians do not. The incident with the patient afflicted with cancer is a case in point.

Indeed, in Memoirs, and in the work of Nawal El Saadawi generally, one really finds two types of physicians: In only two short stories by Nawal El Saadawi do male physicians play a central role without being opposed to women doctors in the same narrative. Rajab, economically less well off than his neighbor, whose Cadillac he envies.

Rajab insults his staff, has too many patients and not enough beds, and feels that he has wasted his seven years in medicine. The arbitrariness of making the woman doctor caring and her male counterpart uncaring is evident when one looks at the strategy of Sherif Hetata, also a physician-writer and the husband of Nawal El Saadawi. Nawal El Saadawi develops the sexual politics of medicine in two ways: This complex of elements is not restricted to Memoirs of a Woman Doctor.

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In Two Women in One, for example, similar themes emerge. The female hero is a medical student who is torn between her medical training and her career as an artist. The thematic nexus of science and art, entities that pull in opposite directions, pervades the fictional narratives of Nawal El Saadawi, tearing her female heroes apart. Here, the narrator reveals that she erred in choosing medicine: Here, the physician narrator expresses her disgust at both her financial and her social status when she wonders how she could possibly have lost her way and entered the field of medicine.

Thus medicine becomes a focus for conflicts and choices in the lives of young women, and these conflicts and choices revolve around medicine as a total system, especially as a career. This she does by focusing on the physician-patient relationship, using a significant, and eminently characteristic, literary technique. This technique is one of embedding or enframing, familiar to Eastern and Western readers alike from The Thousand and One Nights.

She begins the story by explaining her interest in the case of one of the prisoners, Firdaws, a prostitute convicted of murder and awaiting execution. The physician is drawn to this woman—realizing, at the end of the novel, that she herself is no better than the prostitute.

We shall examine this duo in detail in Chapter 3. The voice of many other Saadawian female heroes is epistolary. The physician narrator of the novella The Thread tells the reader, in the frame, that she once had occasion to examine a woman with strange symptoms. The physician later receives a letter from this patient, outlining events from her perspective.

Thus we see the doctor and medicine through the eyes of this patient, who has had a neurotic relationship with her father. The Thread and Woman at Point Zero are similar in several respects. In each case a female physician is reflected through the eyes of a female patient, with the patient receiving more narrative space than the doctor. In addition, both works deliberately set the patient up as the social opposite of the physician.

In this way, both The Thread and Woman at Point Zero cast doubt on the role of the physician as an epitome of science and wisdom, superior to, and detached from, the patient. It is no coincidence that external and internal narrators, doctor and patient, are both women. The literary linkage reflects their common embodiment of the female condition.

Physician and patient alike are caught in the coils of sexual politics. The owner of this internal epistolary voice is named Firdaws, like the internal narrator of Woman at Point Zero. We will compare the sagas of these two women in Chapter 3, when we analyze the story of Firdaws the prostitute. In both narratives, the doctor is able to liberate the stories and give them forms that will assure their life. If these internal narratives could have stood on their own, without help from an external narrator, what is the purpose of the embedding?

First, the external first-person narrator adds a second subjectivity to that of the internal narrator. More important, the embedding technique turns the narrative authority over to the physician, who thus becomes responsible for the transmission of the internal stories. Finally, by having embedded narratives that are not directly related to medical questions, the texts extend the power of the physician beyond the medical into the general. In these four cases of embedded narratives, the stories, both internal and external, are about women.

In all four cases, moreover, a physician narrator presents the saga of a woman who might not, because of her social situation, have the opportunity for literary self-expression. The physician, as a figure of social power, thus serves as a literary conduit that allows the other voices to speak out.

Here again, medicine as a vehicle of empowerment for individual women is set against the more general context of relative female powerlessness. But something far more subtle and more culturally encompassing is being intimated. As cultural critics beginning with Michel Foucault have shown repeatedly, medicine acts as a special discourse, itself a form of power. In the Saadawian corpus, the social power of the physician merges with that of the writer. This is an odd coincidence, indeed, the initial S. In any event, the story that Dr. A young girl is sitting in her clinic, flanked by a tall young man, her brother.

Alone with the doctor, the girl refuses to be examined, but begs her to save her from this brother, who, she says, will surely kill her. The girl objects, insisting that he will simply take her to another doctor. But she is in love with another man and will marry him in a month. She swears to the physician that nothing dishonorable has occurred between them. Similarly, a young woman had visited the narrator of Memoirs of a Woman Doctor in search of protection from murderous male relatives.

Examining her own conscience and the medical code of ethics, the physician in the story calls in the brother and declares to him that his sister is honorable. As she explains it later, she believes that the girl is honorable: It cannot distinguish between honor and dishonor. The physician then writes her own oath: Hence, its presence is quite eloquent. This physician narrator needs a third-person narrator as an intermediary to introduce the writing process itself. The recording of the story in writing differs from the oral and epistolary framings analyzed, although like them it requires mediation.

Like the other protagonists whose sagas need to be narrated by the physician, these two characters from the countryside would not have access to the written word. The female physician is once again the means by which silent voices can tell their stories. But this particular framing highlights an important element that redefines the other enframed narratives.

The story functions as a medical case history. When viewed in this light, the other physician-mediated narratives take on a different cast: The rewriting of the oath is suggestive as well. Rather than adhering to traditional professional values, this physician redefines what medicine should be by setting down her own creed. This act is subversive, calling into question the authoritarian structure of professions like medicine, all of whose members are tied by this bond.

Is this a feminist redefinition of medicine? It could very well be! With the brother-sister pair, El Saadawi has put her medical finger on a deep societal problem. Brother-sister jealousy is pervasive in Arabo-Islamic culture. In fact, the noted Arab folklorist Hasan El-Shamy has boldly argued that brother-sister sexual attraction, with the attendant jealousy, is so powerful in Arab culture that it replaces in its psychological centrality the Oedipus conflict of Western society. The sister in this Saadawian short story is frightened by her brother.

Twice she tells the physician that he will kill her—a not unrealistic expectation, as we will see again in the case of The Circling Song Chapter 4. The female body must be certified as honorable before it can be handed over to the would-be husband. Again medicine as social power for the female comes to the rescue. Her body is a commodity whose honor, if absent, will surely lead to her death. There, the price of a young girl is agreed upon, so much per kilo, and she is taken to the marketplace and weighed in.

Medicine and art are once again joined in an eloquent proclamation. Yet it is through medicine that she has saved the sister from the death threats of her brother. The story of Dr. She may be able to save herself. She may sometimes be able to save others. But what we glimpse already in these medical narratives is another female type: These two types, and the intense emotional electricity that is created when they meet, receive their most powerful expression in the searing novel Woman at Point Zero.

New Voices of Change, ed. Elizabeth Warnock Fernea Austin: University of Texas Press, , pp. The entire text has been translated as Memoirs of a Woman Doctor, trans. Catherine Cobham San Francisco: City Lights Books, This childhood novel, however, did not see the light of day until Comparative references to other Arabic, or even European, texts are merely illustrative and not exhaustive.

Robert Coles New York: See Philippe Lejeune, Le pacte autobiographique Paris: Editions du Seuil, , esp. Three Continents Press, On the general importance of nature for such resolutions, see ibid. Maktabat al-Nahda al-Misriyya, , pp. Feminist Press, , esp. It is, of course, not our task here to examine the compositional process of the author. Presses Universitaires de France, , p. This negative attitude to the mother is not an aberration on the part of El Saadawi but can be seen in other Arabic texts written by women as well. How common this might be in other nondominant literatures remains to be investigated.

Suffice it to say that the Anglophone Indian writer Ved Mehta follows the same procedure. Princeton University Press, , pp. For a discussion of this phenomenon, see Malti-Douglas, Blindness and Autobiography, pp. The number of pamphlets that deal with this issue is enormous and proliferating at an incredible rate. The spread of the Islamist movement has made this issue even more salient, not only in the Middle East but in Europe as well.

See also Chapter 9 below. Roger Allen Minneapolis and Chicago: Bibliotheca Islamica, , pp. Spoken Language Services, , p. Presses Universitaires de France, , pp. I am currently completing a study on this question in contemporary Islamist discourse. Wimbush and Richard Valantasis New York: Oxford University Press, , pp. Susan Rubin Suleiman Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, , p. Cambridge University Press, Osman Nusairi and Jana Gough London: See, for example, Theodora R.

Methuen, , pp. Brill, ; Alf Layla wa-Layla, 2 vols. Minerva, , pp. Editions Gallimard, and Naissance de la clinique. Folklore Publications Group, , esp. Woman at Point Zero: A prostitute convicted of murder and awaiting execution speaks. Her name is Firdaws, Paradise, yet her life seems the earthly antithesis of that other world. Just as riveting is the literary creative process that gives birth to her discourse.

It is also the one that has generated the greatest interest among Western critics working with the translated text. Despite these features, Memoirs is not an autobiography. An intrusive first-person narrator also enframes the haunting Circling Song see Chapter 4. Nowhere in the Saadawian fictional corpus, however, is the problem of the biographical and the novelistic clearer than in Woman at Point Zero.

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