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A review by xterminal
God Dies By The Nile by Nawal El Saadawi
3.0
Nawal el Saadawi, God Dies by the Nile (Zed, 1974)
Nawal el Saadawi, Egyptian doctor, feminist, and activist, has written close to thirty books, spent time in prison for being a subversive, and for more than forty years has been a leader of progressive thinking in Egypt. So why is she almost unknown in America? I'm not entirely sure anyone can answer that question completely. Better to just try and correct the problem.
God Dies by the Nile, originally published in Egypt in 1974, is the story of a family living across the street from the mayor of the peasant village of Kafr el Teen, along the banks of the Nile. We learn early on that the Mayor is a nasty fellow, and with his three cronies (the village doctor, the Captain of the Guard, and the head of the mosque), he controls all the power in the village. Needless to say, he uses this power for the most corrupt of ends.
Zakeya is the titular head of the family across the street. Four years ago, her son Galal went off to fight at Suez, and has never been heard from again. Her brother, a widower, and his two daughters, Nefissa and Zeinab, live with Zakeya. The four of them work in the fields, as does everyone else in the village, until a summons comes from the Mayor: if Nefissa will work in his house as a maid, he will pay the family an almost unimaginable sum per month. Nefissa goes. All this happens before the beginning of the story (but it's better than doing the synopsis on the back of the Zed paperback, which is truly a synopsis--right up to the final chapter, a spoiler extraordinaire). After Nefissa runs away, the Mayor becomes taken with Zeinab, and the whole painful cycle begins again.
God Dies by the Nile is worth reading to the American reader for the same reasons as most other African novels: to get a sense of how similar we are in our cultures despite the various differences in them. Apart from that, while the writing is a tad on the clunky side (this could easily be a problem of translation rather than the original work), the book, which clocks in at a slight 108 pages, is an easy and somewhat compelling read in the vein of classical metatragedy ("meta-" in that the agents of tragedy here are human, and thus the protagonists can do something about them). El Saadawi's characters are wonderfully drawn, for the most part, and the differences in culture mean little when characters are drawn in this detail; you get a feel for the body language of the characters, and what it means, even if it is unfamiliar to you. In this is the book's largest weakness; el Saadawi is so excellent at drawing these characters and showing us their feelings and motivations that when she reiterates them explicitly, she's redoing a job she's already done very well, and so the book tends to slow with repetition now and again. Still, that makes it no less pleasurable, if a story this tragic can be in any way pleasurable. ***
Nawal el Saadawi, Egyptian doctor, feminist, and activist, has written close to thirty books, spent time in prison for being a subversive, and for more than forty years has been a leader of progressive thinking in Egypt. So why is she almost unknown in America? I'm not entirely sure anyone can answer that question completely. Better to just try and correct the problem.
God Dies by the Nile, originally published in Egypt in 1974, is the story of a family living across the street from the mayor of the peasant village of Kafr el Teen, along the banks of the Nile. We learn early on that the Mayor is a nasty fellow, and with his three cronies (the village doctor, the Captain of the Guard, and the head of the mosque), he controls all the power in the village. Needless to say, he uses this power for the most corrupt of ends.
Zakeya is the titular head of the family across the street. Four years ago, her son Galal went off to fight at Suez, and has never been heard from again. Her brother, a widower, and his two daughters, Nefissa and Zeinab, live with Zakeya. The four of them work in the fields, as does everyone else in the village, until a summons comes from the Mayor: if Nefissa will work in his house as a maid, he will pay the family an almost unimaginable sum per month. Nefissa goes. All this happens before the beginning of the story (but it's better than doing the synopsis on the back of the Zed paperback, which is truly a synopsis--right up to the final chapter, a spoiler extraordinaire). After Nefissa runs away, the Mayor becomes taken with Zeinab, and the whole painful cycle begins again.
God Dies by the Nile is worth reading to the American reader for the same reasons as most other African novels: to get a sense of how similar we are in our cultures despite the various differences in them. Apart from that, while the writing is a tad on the clunky side (this could easily be a problem of translation rather than the original work), the book, which clocks in at a slight 108 pages, is an easy and somewhat compelling read in the vein of classical metatragedy ("meta-" in that the agents of tragedy here are human, and thus the protagonists can do something about them). El Saadawi's characters are wonderfully drawn, for the most part, and the differences in culture mean little when characters are drawn in this detail; you get a feel for the body language of the characters, and what it means, even if it is unfamiliar to you. In this is the book's largest weakness; el Saadawi is so excellent at drawing these characters and showing us their feelings and motivations that when she reiterates them explicitly, she's redoing a job she's already done very well, and so the book tends to slow with repetition now and again. Still, that makes it no less pleasurable, if a story this tragic can be in any way pleasurable. ***