It seems that there are two primary reasons for a person to write—the first being that of expression, perhaps catharsis, and the second, a desire to be understood, and to take the reader to the same place the writer is at the moment pen meets paper. Few words have grabbed me, spoken to me, moved me, and made me feel as though I myself could have written them the way Nawal El Saadawi’s A Modern Love Letter has mesmerized me—each and every line.
I could easily say that I identify with El Saadawi as a woman, or is it as a human that this parallel is stemmed from? For my own sanity’s sake, I have chosen to decide that it is as an independent and intelligent woman. Intelligent, because it is my belief that the greatest knowledge is realizing how little we truly know.
Each day, from the moment I awaken, before my eyes find a way to open, or my feet find the floor, I find myself in search of the answers to life—to understand and to be understood.
El Saadawi says the very same thing in the first sentence of her work—the moment that captured me. “…so that you may perhaps understand me or that I may perhaps understand myself. The attempt may come to nothing, for who is able to understand himself or the other? Who is able to break the shell? Just as attempting to break it merely confirms that it is not broken, so attempting to understand only increases the feeling of not understanding. And yet I try. I realize for certain that the attempt is futile but that does not stop me trying, just as I do not give up living my life, knowing that death is inevitable.”
The more I attempt to understand or to make myself understood, the less of an understanding there seems to be. Even when an understanding seems to have been achieved between two people, don’t we then realize that there are others that don’t understand us, or that we ourselves don’t understand? And yet, we continue to try. We forage for this understanding as if it were a life-sustaining nutrient. How many times will a person, tell the same story again? The beggar, sifting through debris, moving from dumpster to dumpster, looking for a morsel to appease the hunger, is he any different than the person who moves down a line of people relating the same incident looking for someone to understand? Are they not both looking for sustenance?
El Saadawi describes the happy medium that society has come to believe is what everyone should strive for. She describes it as the “halfway position,” loving but not loving, hating but not hating. And, as she states, this is how mental health is defined, and that to be considered healthy, a person must be dishonest with him/her self and not truly feel, but be somewhere in between.
I spent most of my life loving but not loving, hating but not hating. I denied myself to be expressive; I wanted to be viewed as healthy, sane, and yet, that is when I most felt as though I was balancing like a tightrope walker. Sanity lay on one side, and on the other, madness. One deep or rapid breath, and my balance could be lost—but which way would I fall? People are often afraid of those people who display or express intense emotion. We are terrified of the fire of one man’s wrath, and we dub the jubilant man crazy; we welcome the man in the middle—the man that neither loves nor hates—the safe man.
El Saadawi also writes of a feeling of loneliness, of being surrounded by people, and yet feeling isolated. She speaks of times with her friend and despite their close proximity, the lack of “touch,” and the push and pull of wanting to abandon the loneliness, and run away, push away, and hide from the very thing she seeks.
My life has been a constant push and pull of that which I desire, and that which I am afraid of. How many times I have been in the company of people, many people, and felt very alone. Is it because I am different and feel misunderstood, or is it because I have pushed them away? My entire marriage, I pondered how it was that I could share a living space and a bed with the man I called my husband, have one body against another, and yet feel that a touch never occurred.
“In truth, most of the time I live in my dreams for I can choose and change them, whereas it is reality which changes me without my choosing,” writes El Saadawi.
In my dreams, I can be a director, an editor. I can cut out the parts I don’t like, and replay the parts I do. I can change things to suit me—to encourage my sanity, or promote my madness. Sometimes, I feel that the division between the two is so fine it is almost nonexistent. My imagination, it is either my greatest ally or my most lethal opponent, depending on how I chose to use it. But, it is mine, and I alone have the choice.
Although El Saadawi never actually says to her friend that she loves him, she expresses passionately, intensely, that she is drawn to him, wants him, and at moments has come very close to telling him what he means to her, and yet she is afraid of losing her freedom.
So many American women lose themselves and their identity when they become involved in a relationship. They become someone’s mother, someone else’s wife or girlfriend, and they always remain another’s daughter, and frequently, somewhere while picking up these many titles, they misplace the most vital one, that of themselves. Having experienced that myself, I fought one of my most difficult battles, with everything inside of me, to regain my most precious title and my autonomy. To once again become Angela. It was that fight that has made me so guarded. No matter how important something or someone is to me, there remains a fortress around that title, protecting it as if it were the royal crown, the last remaining heir to the throne.
El Saadawi ends her letter asking, “after all this, can you still accuse me of being incapable of loving? Can you again tell me that I don’t understand…can you now understand me a little? And do I understand you a little?”
I could fill volumes with my written attempts to understand and be understood. My confessions, my questions, and all my emotions—my sanity and my madness, have found it safe to venture out from their hiding places most frequently when they could take advantage of the rendezvous between pen and paper.
There is not a line in El Saadawi’s A Modern Love Letter that does not hypnotize me. One does not have to be an Arab woman to identify with the work. One only has to desire to be understood, and to feel the conflict of wanting something so badly, and wondering if we are willing to gamble those things that we have fought so hard to obtain. After reading this for the fifth time, I can only wonder, could I have written this during some dissociative fugue? No? Oh, then El Saadawi and I must have spoken during one of my dreams, for it is all so real to me.