In her novel “A Certain Woman,” recently translated into English, Hala El Badry writes about the self imposed taboos, which keep a woman from self-fulfillment while, at the same time, exploring the boundaries of love and desire. First published in Arabic in 2001, the book was not only well received by women but also by male and female critics. It was awarded the prize for best novel of 2001 at the Cairo International Book Fair.
At a recent Conference in Cairo entitled Women and the Media, the majority of the participants criticized the Egyptian media for perpetuating prejudicial attitudes against women. Said Darwish, head of the Internews Agency, acknowledged that the most important magazines for women in Egypt never touch on women’s rights or their role in society.
With a refreshing boldness, El Badry analyses restrictive social patterns and underlines the intricate complexities inherent in human relationships. “I wanted to write something about love. Why? I don’t really know. I asked myself what I could produce after all that has been written about love. I decided to write about love nowadays in Egypt. I tried to discuss what happens when a person is in love.”
In one, a character expresses how she feels about love: “The more certain I became of my reading, the more deeply I was involved with him. I listened to the cells of his soul in the rhythm of the unspoken, in the words of the book and I discovered that in his absence he was present in the very heart of my heart.”
El Badry said, “Young women’s reactions to my novel especially here in Egypt were incredible. They encouraged me to continue writing on these issues. Very often when I am invited to speak about my book, I am asked why men become so negative after they marry and why husbands care so little about their wives’ feelings.”
Despite the many betrayals and deceptions in this love story, an overall sense of joy permeates the novel. El Badry herself admits that she enjoys life and believes that every moment is a gift. In the opening pages she admits, “an author gives each hero a little bit of their soul.”
Although the reader is led to believe that the author is close to Nahid, the main character, El Badry is quick to answer that all the characters have taken something from her: “I have given Omar my political opinions, Maggy shares my childhood in Alexandria and I share with Nahid the way I think. Sometimes I cannot go ahead with my decisions. I want something but I cannot reach it because of personal or professional reasons as well as family commitments.”
El Badry scans people’s intimate thoughts; perceptions, feelings and preconceived ideas and shows how all of them create barriers, forcing people to live marginal lives. The frustrations encountered by characters in the novel not only concern their personal lives. Omar, the journalist, cannot publish all he knows so he translates an article by a British journalist, which enables him to divulge the information he was prevented from writing about.
‘A Certain Woman’ has also attracted critics’ attention because of its particular form. Each chapter is a short story with a meaning of its own. The reader is not compelled to read the chapters in the traditional way. El Badry says, “In each novel I change my style of writing. I constructed this story differently. The novel has no center and no real ending. Anyone can open the book and read any chapter and still understand the gist of the story. In each one of my novels, I try to surprise the reader but the message remains the same. I want to help people know themselves. I want them to appreciate their freedom, their rights and their humanity.”
El Badry is currently deputy editor-in-chief of Egypt’s radio and television magazine. She is grateful that her job has not taken her away from writing but she is acutely aware that it is an almost impossible task to live by one’s writing in the Arab world: “I have published ten books but my main source of income is my job.” She is appreciative that her current job as a journalist requires her to write and she admits unashamedly that writing is an obsession: “I cannot stop writing! I’ll be crazy if I stop writing. I cannot imagine living and not writing. Writing is to me the perfect pleasure. It is also an act of freedom.”
Like many writers, she works throughout the night and early in the morning: “I like the night because it gives me something I cannot get during the day. At nighttime I am freer; I feel the hours of the day are a burden on my shoulders.” She writes the old fashioned way with a pen in a music-filled room. Her intense love of music is strikingly apparent in the novel when the main character explains that “music... was able to sneak into my heart and close it, and drown me with the mystery of the universe.”
