by Nawal El Saadawi
This is the story of Firdaus, a girl born in Egypt to a poor family. Although she is intelligent, resourceful, and has a strong spirit, there are so few choices for her as a woman in her society. She is fortunate to have a secondary certificate (middle school?), but after being repeatedly raped, a...
A brutal and disturbing story, this (though mercifully short). Firdaus tells her story with an incantatory force, daring the reader to try and judge her. The reader is just as implicated as the psychiatrist in the frame story, who experiences emotions told in words that echo Firdaus's. It's a compel...
A tightly constructed fictional study of PTSD, deceptively simply told within a clinical frame narrative given more credibility by the author's professional work. The protagonist committed a murder after betrayal after betrayal and a reductive cultural version of male-female relations. In this cultu...
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