A Modern Love Letter by Nawal El Saadawi

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.

Milan Kundera's "Identity"

Kundera’s Identity is a novel which travels back and forth between the believable and the unbelievable. Kundera magnificently transitions between reality and fantasy. Often it is difficult to distinguish between Kudnera’s two worlds, if it is possible to make the distinction at all. There are many parts of Kundera’s story that seem very real, very normal; however, the bulk of the story has a surreal atmosphere about it.

From the beginning, the story reminded me of a dream. The way the story shifted from scene to scene without any warning and the way so many of the actions, attitudes and characters seemed out of place all gave the story an otherworldliness about it. I found myself thinking either the book consisted of dream scenes, or it was about people who were demented and was written by someone who suffers from severe psychological problems.

The novel beings like a passionate love story. Chantal is in Normandy waiting for Jean-Marc to arrive. She is in a restaurant when she overhears two waitresses talking about a television show, “Lost to Sight.” Chantal thinks about how difficult it would be for her to lose Jean-Marc, to never know what happened to him, and to have to live the rest of her days in misery, because suicide would be a refusal to wait for him. You get the impression she has as deep and intense love for Jean-Marc. For Chantel a life without Jean-Marc would be a life of misery.

Chantel has to spend one night alone in Normandy before Jean-Marc arrives. During the night, her sleep is broken, and she has a dream involving people from her past. She finds the dream disturbing. I think this is where the story shifts to fantasy. Although many parts of the first half of the story seem believable, Kundera never says Chantal went back to sleep after the dream. I think Chantal continued to sleep, and it was during her sleep that she dreamed the rest of the story. Perhaps it was sleeping without Jean-Marc that caused her sleep to be so restless.

The novel hints of having a surrealistic undertone early in the story. The story regularly shifts from scene to scene and has situations and conversations that seem out of place, much like the dreams so many of us have. From the beginning I found myself asking how certain situations could be true and thought it reminded me of a dream.

When Jean-Marc finds Chantal in Normandy, she is unable to embrace him. When he tries to comfort Chantal, after she says, “men don’t turn to look at me anymore,” she pushes him away. With the exceptions of how she came to live with Jean-Marc and when they met at the ski lodge, Chantal never mentions Jean-Marc with much affection. I found this to be rather peculiar since in the first chapter she thinks about how miserable life would be without him. If her love for him is so strong, then why can’t she embrace the man she loves or allow him to embrace her? This suggests the scene is Chantal’s fantasy.

Then there was the emphasis on Jean-Marc’s mistaking Chantal’s identity and his inability to recognize her form other women. In the beginning, when he first arrives in Normandy, he mistakes Chantal for a woman on the beach whom he describes as old and ugly. He questions Chantal’s identity again as the scene with the letters is unfolding. He beings to think she is a simulacrum. When Chantal’s sister-in-law is talking with Jean-Marc, he again thinks that the woman he loves is a simulacrum. His questioning Chantal’s identity is even evident on the train when upon seeing Chantal, he is unable to recognize her hand or her laughter and her happiness even though he knows it is indeed Chantal. I don’t think Jean-Marc caused the identity issues. I think Chantal is a very independent and strong person, but her love for Jean-Marc causes her to feel emotional vulnerable, and it manifests itself in her dreams.

Chantal believes the author of the letters to be the first man in the bistro, and later she believes the author to be the old man under the tree. When she begins to figure out that it is Jean-Marc who wrote the letters, instead of being touched, she is angry and paranoid that he is spying on her. This paranoia of being spied on leads her to a graphologist’s office. In the graphologist’s office, Chantal recognizes one of the men as the man from the café in Normandy, and again he makes her feel she is in danger. Most women would be touched if their husband or boyfriend sent them letters calling them beautiful. They would think it was very sweet. They would not be convinced he was spying on her. As for the man in the graphologist’s office being the same man from Normandy, sure, it could happen, but I find it highly doubtful. Besides, if the scene were real, why did it take Chantal so long to recognize him when he had cause do much panic in her in Normandy? Once again, Kundera was subtly telling his readers that it was all a dream.

It is odd that when her sister-in-law arrives with her children, of all the things to play with and to get into, the children find the letters under Chantal’s brassieres, thus causing Chantal to ask her sister-in-law to leave. Shortly afterward, Chantal also leaves the apartment. For a woman who loves a man so intensely that she could not bear the thought of losing him, Chantal finds it too easy to walk out on Jean-Marc.

The point when I could no longer believe what the author was writing in was at the train station and the succeeding scenes. Chantal leaves Jean-Marc and has no idea where she will go. She tells him that she has to go to London for work; however, once she leaves the apartment, she doesn’t know where she will end up. She decides to go to London for the evening, and she just happens to run into her colleague in London. Then, when Jean-Marc decided to go after her, he happens to go to the exact place that Chantal is at. In reality, what is the likelihood of that happening? From there the story only gets more bizarre and travels into the obscure at an even quicker pace. Chantal sexualizes the train ride, from the way she sees the train descending into the tunnel to the way she sees the older refined lady as the victim of an orgy. Her mind is constantly thinking sexual thoughts. When she is at the house of the orgy, Jean-Marc follows her there (red was a recurring color through out the story), he quickly gives up when he cannot gain entrance into the house. When Chantal is in the salon with the septuagenarian, the septuagenarian is calling Chantal the name Anne, again bringing up the issue of identity. This is the point in the story where there are the most dramatic scene shifts. It is at this point that it becomes obvious the story is a dream. The deeper our sleep becomes, the more obscure our dreams become. It is during sleep that we often find ourselves in situation that make no sense and that dreams are often the most disturbing.

I think in a very subtle way, Kundera may have been trying to tell his readers that he story was a dream. There are many scenes involving sleep, dreams, and consciousness. However, as readers, we have a tendency to believe what we are reading, and unless the author tells us otherwise, we rarely question it. I think Kundera tried to make us believe the story, and when we find out the story is a dream, it is more difficult for us to figure out which parts are reality and which parts are fantasy. Kundera tries to make the distinction even more difficulty by asking the reader who to whom the dream belongs.

It appears that the story shifts from reality to dream when Chantal is asleep in Normandy the first night waiting for Jean-Marc. However, her dream doesn’t become ridiculously far fetched until the scene at the train station.

For the most part, Chantal was the dreamer. In the beginning, while waiting for Jean-Marc in Normandy, she is sleeping and is awakens in the middle of the night by a dream involving people from her past. Kundera never says that Chantal stayed awake for the rest of the night. I think that Chantal fell back asleep after the first dream and that is when the rest of the story occurred. It is probably when Jean-Marc arrived, perhaps while Chantal was asleep, that he went to sleep beside her and woke her when she began to scream. It was in the salon that Chantal started to feel that sense of danger that one usually feels just before one screams during a dream. I think the dream belonged to Chantal entirely rather than to Jean-Marc. Jean-Marc did not seem as paranoid as Chantal, and the story focuses more her thoughts and emotions. Jean-Marc seems more like he is someone who is an actor cast in her theatrical production. Chantal is the one who screams in the dream, and it is Jean-Marc who comforts her and reassures her that “Chantal. Chantal. Chantal. It’s not real.” By doing so he returns her identity to her. At the very end of the story, Chantal does not want to let Jean-Marc out of her sight for fear that in the second it takes to blink, she could lose him. Jean-Marc doesn’t say much or show much emotion at the end of the book. It is Chantal who is emotional, just as someone who has had a very emotional dream. Had it been Jean-Marc’s dream with the thought of losing the woman he loves most, he likely would be more emotional upon waking from the dream.

Kundera does a wonderful job of making the reader question the reality of what is being read. For the first two-thirds of the book, almost any of the scenes could be perfectly believable on their own, but when they are added together, they become more difficult to fathom. However, I think if anyone has ever had an obscure or upsetting dream and pays close enough attention to Kundera’s clues, then he or she can see that the story is fantasy from the beginning.