Nawal El Saadawi

I read Nawal El Saadawi around the time I first encountered Simone de Beauvoir years ago.

 I read about the life of El Saadawi and I borrowed The Hidden Face of Eve.

  Yesterday I picked up this book again and she states that Westerners get most of their sense of Arab culture and their intimate lives from the Arabian Nights. A text that is a thousand years old is the primary source of knowledge about the private lives of Arabs.

 I find myself revisiting the old books, the ones I first read twenty years ago. Albert Camus has been an unbroken connection across two decades but there are many writers like El Saadawi who I want to revisit with older eyes.