Memoirs of a Woman doctor by Nawal El Saadawi

Memoirs of a Woman Doctor by Nawal El Saadawi

Egyptian fiction

Original title – ” مذكرات طبيبة

Translator – Catherine Cobham

Source – review copy

I decided to take a detour from the Booker list and I had read this when I was sent it and never got to it which is a shame as I really enjoyed it and I admire Nawal as a person called the Simone De Beauvoir of the Arabic world she has long been a champion of women in the Arabic world. former movements for both female rights and human rights within the Arabic world. She was also a doctor before being a writer. I was grabbed by her a  few years ago when she was on the BBC show Imagine talking about her life she even showed the first practice which is in this book.

I hated being female. I felt as if I was in chains – chains forged by my own blood trying me to the bed so that I couldn’t run and jump, chains produced by the cells of my own body, chains of shame and humiliation. I turned in on myself to cover up my miserable exictence.

I no longer went out to run and play. The two mounds on my chest were growing bigger. They bounced gently as I walked. I was unhappy with my tall slender frame folding my arms over my chest to hide it and looking sadly at my brother and his friends as they played.

The years she becomes a teen and more visible as a woman.

This is a fictionalized version of Nawal’s own journey in many ways. The narrator of the books is a driven young woman growing up in fifties Egypt. Her observations as a child reveal much about the society of the time.  her older brother always has the best in there home the larges slice of meat at breakfast that she sees as unfair. The best things are always his and as she grows even thou she is younger she is bigger than her brother. she is determined to study medicine. This is a wonderful female take on the Bildungsroman genre as we see her fight the male-centered society from her fellow students when studying medicine. She cuts her hair and avoids the arranged marriage her parents try to push her into. Then when she becomes a doctor her patients are shocked she is so beautiful as a doctor this line made me laugh as thou the beauty of the doctor made a difference. A failed marriage against her parent’s advice but when he tries to tell her what to do in the home she decides he isn’t the one. She is battling all the time is that perfect man just around the corner.

I left my room and went to sit in the big common room. I opened a medical journal and tried to read it, but I couldn’t help my thoughts straying to the doctor’s wing where the colleague on night duty was nownow asleep. For no obvious reason it occurred to me that i was alone with a man in the middle of the night and only a closed doorseparated e from him. Althouh I was wide awake this idea came to me like a dream and I felt afraid …. No,Not afraid,worried..No, not even that, for I felt desifre, or not quite desire but a strange disturbing feelin that made me glance furtively at closed door from time to time

It is hard for her at the medical school as this pasage shows.

This is a very short book easily read in an evening. Great feminist work about how determined women in a very male-centered society could make her way even with hurdles put in front of her. The shock of her first view of a naked male when she was at medical school when she had to cut up a dead male and this was her first view. I felt the latter part of the book was maybe trying to put too many years into too few pages which is a great shame as the early family years and the time studying were very captivating. But the later times were maybe lightly covered. This was her first novel and it was a great debut I was sent the other books that  Saqi brought out in there Saqi bookshelf series.