Memoirs of a Woman Doctor by Nawal El Saadawi Read Free Book Online

for a woman to combine being beautiful with being clever.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘Then I’ll tell you: because from early childhood a girl is brought up to believe that she’s a body and nothing more, so her body becomes her main concern for the rest of her life, and she doesn’t realize that she’s got a mind as well which must be looked after and encouraged to develop.’
    ‘Why do they do that?’
    ‘Because men, who hold the key positions in life, don’t want women to be anything more than beautiful, stupid animals whose legs they can lie between when they feel like it. Men don’t want women as equals or partners; they want them to be subordinate and to serve them.’
    He laughed and so did I. He came closer and said, ‘I’m not one of those men. I want a woman who’s my partner, not my servant. I’m proud of your mind. You can’t imagine how happy I feel when I go into your surgery and see with my own eyes all those men and women waiting for you to cure them and make them healthy, desperate for your opinion and your expertise. How could a woman with a mind like yours be shut up in a house doing the cooking? Or one with your intelligence and learning waste her life breastfeeding like an illiterate peasant — or worse, like cats and dogs? It would be absurd, an insult to you and the whole human race.’
    His words penetrated and quietened my rebellious depths and calmed my confused heart. I felt the conflict between me and the male sex evaporating and leant my tired head contentedly back against the stone of the pyramid. Why hadn’t my mother spoken to me like this, or society recognized the truth of notions such as these? And here was a man doing it, acknowledging that women had minds; that a woman, just like a man, had both a body and a mind. Here was a man uttering the very words I’d said to myself ever since I’d first noticed what was going on around me.
    I looked at him, trying to make out where these just, mature words were coming from. From the hidden depths of him or from his throat? I could see nothing. The gap between his depths and his throat was non-existent. Perhaps I didn’t see any depth to him, or perhaps the sun had dropped into that deep chasm into which it vanishes every night and the shadows had blurred the sharp outlines of things.
    I felt his cold hands and looked into his face. His gentle, submissive smile aroused my maternal instincts, but his weak, beseeching glances failed to arouse my femininity. Was it because he was weak, weaker than me? Or because he hadn’t my experience of suffering? Or because his eyes lacked that profound inner strength which I thought a man’s eyes should possess? Could it be because I still had in my blood the instincts of a wild woman of the forest who loved the man who made her submit to him? But he appealed to something in me. Perhaps his weakness gave me the confirmation of my own strength. Perhaps the look of need in his eyes was gratifying to my mind which still wanted to dominate.

    Smiling, he said to me, ‘Mummy had the same strong expression... but her eyes were green.’
    The word ‘mummy’ sounded out-of-place and incongruous coming out from under a thick bushy moustache which made his features look like those of a small child with a dead black insect stuck to its upper lip.
    ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ I heard him say.
    ‘Did you love your mother?’
    His eyes filled with tears for a moment. ‘Very much,’ he said. I was unmoved by his tears. He went on, ‘After she died, the world seemed empty... but I found you and it was full again.’
    ‘That’s strange!’
    ‘What is?’
    ‘That the world can seem empty to you after someone’s died.’
    ‘She was my mother, and I loved her tremendously. Everything she did was for my sake. What about you? Didn’t you love your mother?’
    ‘I loved her... but she never filled my life.’
    ‘Perhaps you loved your father more?’
    ‘No more, no