They cut out her tongue first. Later came the rest. For the Imam ruled according to the laws of God’s Sharia. Stone adulterous women to death. Cut off the hands of those who commit a theft. Slash off the tongues of those who spread rumors about irradiated milk.
-The Fall of the Imam, Nawal El Saadawi
She tell me how forty Arabs drag her into a mosque and rape her presumably in sequence…
-Naked Lunch, William Burroughs
William Lee, an Exterminator- Interzone Incorporated? A Hallucinated Giant Talking Beetle- An organization based in the Interzone…a notorious port on the North African coast. A haven for the mongrel scum of the Earth…an engorged parasite on the underbelly of the West. William Lee- Ah, I can’t see it.
-Naked Lunch, screenplay by David Cronenberg
I first met Nawal El Saadawi in 1984 at the womens center she directed, on the same block of Sharia Darih Sa’ad I had lived on five years earlier. I wanted to interview her about Cairene pharmacists who doubled as untrained OB/GYNs advising patients across their countertops. Yes, the womens health care system in Egypt was screwy. Nawal was a medical doctor and enraged about it.
I must have given her my telephone number in New York because even though I hadn’t seen her since 1988 when I was back in Cairo making Voice of the Whip, she called me at home in 1991 to invite me for coffee. She said her son wanted to study filmmaking in the States and thought I knew something. I invited her to see Naked Lunch which I thought would have some interesting Orientalist imagery for her to chew on later.
I don’t know what she may have expected, I told her it was based on the Beat classic and Burroughs had lived in Tangier near Paul Bowles. Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky had just been made and maybe she thought it would be something like that, something great she could tell her friends back in Cairo about before word had spread.
We left half way through. I think she must have hated the misogyny more than the violence and drug use, let alone its complete incoherence which in a novel you can escape by putting it down for a minute or a day but not in a movie theater. We didn’t talk about why we’d just walked out. I apologized for wasting her time. We parted on the sidewalk and I never heard from her again. But then I thought of Burroughs killing his wife in life and in the film. A suspended two year sentence in Mexico, typically an unprosecuted honor crime in Egypt…she would not have been surprised by either.