A Certain Woman

Hala El Badry

Description

In this prize-winning novel, Nahid is a woman determined to go on a journey of self discovery and understanding. As we accompany her in her sometimes delirious, sometimes lucid journey, we are given rare glimpses of the inner thoughts and feelings of a woman confronting questions of love and intimacy within and outside of marriage. It is a story of one woman's quest for liberation, not from a repressive society or a male-dominated world that is easy and has been done many times before but from self-imposed taboos that inhibit a woman's ability to find fulfillment and to confront the many imponderables surrounding sexuality, desire, and love. Stuck by conscious choice to keep up the genteel appearances of her middle-class family in a loveless marriage to Mustafa, the forty-something Nahid finds love and sex with novelist and journalist Omar himself trapped in a loveless, but not sexless, marriage to Maggie. Although their love story is at the very heart of the novel, we are given broad glimpses of the larger picture of the world outside through Nahid's work as an archaeologist and Omar's as a journalist. The novel was well received by women readers, critics, and reviewers and by a majority of the male audience, while a vociferous minority of male critics felt scandalized by it, finding it unseemly that such issues should be raised by a woman. Now English readers can judge for themselves.

Sujets

• Literary
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: The American University in Cairo Press
• Date de parution: 01 septembre 2006
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781617971594
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

English translation copyright © 2003 by
The American University in Cairo Press
113 Sharia Kasr el Aini, Cairo, Egypt
420 Fifth Avenue, New York 10018
www.aucpress.com
First published in Arabic in 2001 as Imra’atun ma
Copyright © 2001 by Hala El Badry
Protected under the Berne Convention
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Dar el Kutub No. 19215/02
eISBN: 978 161 797 159 4
Designed by Joanne Cunningham/AUC Press Design Center
Printed in Egypt
Translator’s Note
In consultation with the author, I have edited and condensed parts of “Unplanned Communities” in Part Four and “Land Mines” in Part Five. I take sole and full responsibility for these revisions. The controversy depicted in “Pursuit” in Part Six is an almost factual description of the furor created by the re-publication in Egypt, by an agency of the Egyptian Ministry of Culture, of Syrian author Haydar Haydar’s novel, A Banquet for Seaweed. Deemed blasphemous and denounced as such by vocal Islamists, it caused riots by students of al-Azhar, Egypt’s oldest Islamic university, and started a heated, sometimes quite violent discussion about censorship, art, and freedom of expression, a discussion that is still going on. I would like to thank the following friends for help with various aspects of the translation: Dina Rabadi and Katherine Strange (University of Chicago) and Neil Hewison and Kelly Zaug (The American University in Cairo Press).
A Maze
She turned off the headlights of her car and sneaked through the gate of the garden into the house now bathed in a quiet semidarkness. A strong fragrance wafted from the white lilies she had picked in the early morning and put in the crystal vases in different rooms. The flowers shed smooth yellow pollen that looked like a light powder throughout the ground floor of the villa, creating a pervasive presence akin to lavender. Most of the sunflowers had drooped, except those that were close to the pale light escaping from the yellow chandeliers casting variegated shadows through the brass, which was cut in shapes suggestive of branches and leaves. Everything in the place suggested a delicate, soft taste; jarring it, though, was a mess of rolls of paper, drawings, and maps stacked under a statue of Alexander the Great, above which a constant light burned. At the other end of the long corridor, she moved quietly, anxious not to be heard, and stood under the clothes tree, her shadow reflected on the glass table that rested on a porcelain nymph. She tried hard to avoid disturbing the creatures she loved—the plants, the dogs, and the cats— by her physical presence.
She reached for a light cotton nightgown and a pair of slippers, then carefully unbuttoned her blouse as she followed the movements of a cricket that kept chirping more loudly than her own heartbeats, which she thought were thundering. She threw all her clothes on the chair and a statue of Venus on the nearby bookshelf almost toppled. She dashed to catch it before it hit the floor. She swallowed hard and breathed deeply. When finally she found herself safely inside her nightgown, she grew bolder and turned on the television only to find that it was toward the end of the programs for the day—the late news. She turned on the radio, turning the dial to “The Music Program.” She didn’t know, as she opened the big window overlooking the garden on the north side, that she did this every day at the same time and that she took deep breaths thousands of times, as if she were trembling, for fear of making any sound—as if she were penetrating invisible barriers.
When she pushed the door, which made its usual squeaking sound, she turned toward it, placing one hand on her mouth and the other on the door to prevent the screen door from slamming back hard, but it did anyway. It was as if she were hearing it for the first time. She stepped into the garden and her dog Rocky came and rubbed against her feet. She patted his head thinking, “He’s the first to sense my presence. He always comes to me cheerfully.” She had taught Rocky not to make a sound when he welcomed her so she wouldn’t be found out. He would just sit next to her as she read, as if the two of them had been created sitting like that from the beginning of time. She patted the head of a statue of the famous Greek horse which was rearing on its hind legs, opening its wings halfway as it got ready to fly. It represented her recurring dream that she is unable to realize, unable to free her feet which are planted deep into the ground. “O Pegasus, Pegasus!” a sigh that often reverberated in the midst of the plants and the flowers. Her eyes surveyed the garden and she reassured herself of the calm, which she described as “the condition that allows beings other than us to possess the universe on their own, regardless of us.” A male frog called his mate and a disquieting thought occurred to her: “Is Mustafa really asleep or just pretending, or avoiding me? I know he wakes up when I enter the house. Many times I think he knows everything.”
She picked up the last chapter of Omar’s new novel A Maze as her shadow grew longer on the garden wall and extended so much that her hand seemed to reach their neighbor’s first floor apartment. She began to read the murder scene. “Omar describes my house so precisely, as if he has lived in it even though he hasn’t visited me here even once. Maybe because of the many details he’s heard from me.” She continued to devour the words with loving, proud eyes under a lamp that focused the light on the pages of the book alone.
“His comments,” she thought, “do not come from just thin air. Does it make sense that he has resigned himself to our situation? Living a double life together, one half of it public, preserving the social status, and the other half secret? Why does he accept it when he’s always turning his back on the past? Is it just to hold on to what he owns? Is it a question of pride? This is an oversimplification! Why do I feel that my senses are so worked up, as if things around me were throbbing inside my own nerves?” She shuddered as she felt unable to concentrate on her fear of sounds getting louder, or the lights dancing, or the heat permeating her body, or the suspense that Omar was creating around his heroine, who represented her. She read on:
“Everything around me is tied to a wire wound around my guts. There’s something mysterious, some debris that I keep trying in vain to climb out of, as if seeing a cloud darkening the sky the whole time. It is seldom cloudy during the summer here. Is the sky telling me something that I fail to grasp?”
A long black tail. It must be that of a cat, for rats don’t have such big tails. How come I didn’t see it when it went by me to reach the bamboo chair on this side? It’s a cat, no doubt about it. A second set of eyes shining on the other side means they are getting together for one reason or another.
“Omar,” she thought to herself, “wrote this ending without being convinced of it, just to be contrary to my opinion. I told him, ‘Let him kill her.’ But he said, ‘I don’t want to give in. It would mean that the novel is condemning her. This would satisfy society, which is leading two contradictory lives itself.’”
She was startled when a gray cat suddenly appeared in front of the black cat. She made a gesture as if she was going to throw something at it and the two cats ran towards the trees. Their shadows that a short while ago looked like a wedding of ghosts, scattered. She clasped her hands together as she stretched on the chair, resting her feet on the opposite chair, exactly like the scene she is reading:
When he made out the car’s lights and sensed her sneaking into the house, he stood in the midst of the plants in the balcony, quietly blending in with the prevailing calm until the atmosphere got accustomed to his body heat. He thought to himself, “How come she doesn’t feel this heat near her when she uses instinct to know the world around her exactly like wary wild creatures? Does the daily physical caution and her focus on not waking me up make her fail to realize that I am actually here? Perhaps she thinks I am unaware of how she is leading her life. She has eliminated me from her life as if she has the ability to do that. We’ll know now who can eliminate whom.”
He had spent the afternoon rearranging the plant pots. He replaced large pots with smaller ones placed on the shelf above where she always sits to read after midnight. He placed a thin piece of wood between the steel shelf and the pot so it wouldn’t slip prematurely. When he was totally sure that he could pull the piece of wood causing the pot to slide down, he carefully put it there, making sure the piece of wood kept it in place. He replaced two other pots using the same method. The sky above the garden was now full of perils.
She noticed her shadow elongated in front of her on the wall as she turned the page. She wondered to herself, “Who put the chair for me with such precision as if preparing it for me?”
She smiled as she raised her head towards the sky. Her eyes caught a huge plant pot hurtling down from the edge of the balcony on the floor above. Behind it she discerned a deep gleam in Mustafa’s eyes as they narrowed with an intense hate that she hadn’t seen in him before. The sudden panic was mixed with an ironic understanding of the story, so she smiled broadly without moving from where she was.
Meeting
I watched him take the cigar out of its cellophane wrapper and calmly put it in his mouth in silence, and as he lit it, he gave himself totally to it, puffing it with a sm