Nawal El-Saadawi, Memoirs of a Woman Doctor
Nawal el-Saadawi wrote "Memoirs of a Woman Doctor" 30 years ago, when she had just graduated from the School of Medicine in Cairo. Considered a revolutionary feminist novel from the time of its 1957 debut as a serial in the Egyptian magazine Rose al-Yousif, it was heavily monitored, as were eventual publications in book form. Since then, the novel has been reprinted several times in both Cairo and Beirut, but was never to be published in its entirety, because she had lost the original manuscript.

Written in the first person, "Memoirs" is a novel, and the author has repeatedly insisted it is not autobiographical, although the heroine is a young Egyptian woman studying and then practicing medicine. El-Saadawi herself studied psychiatry in Cairo. The storyteller 's life, like Saadawi's, is a series of battles, and she is from the beginning a rebel who challenges the limitations on the value of women in the family, society and the world.

Since the publication of "Memoirs of a Woman Doctor", Saadawi has gone on to write 32 books, mostly dealing with Arab women, imperialism and globalization. Her books, including novels and studies of women in the Arab world, have been translated into more than 30 languages. Her views on women led to her being dismissed from the Ministry of Health, and even to being imprisoned under Sadat in 1981, which inspired her 1984 work "Memoirs from the Women's Prison."
In 1992, she fled Egypt for five years after her name appeared on a death list issued by an Islamic fundamentalist group.
She has now completed writing her autobiography. And in it written: "I still consider 'Memoirs' like a first daughter, full of youthful flame and expressing a reality which is still relevant today. It is a simple, spontaneous novel in which there is a lot of anger against the oppression of women in my country, but also a great deal of hope for change, for wider horizons and a better future."
The nameless heroine of "Memoirs" deals with the issues that implode on her young mind. The body and its functions becomes the spine of the heroine's evolution from a young girl who is denied the privileges and freedoms her brother has, to a woman medical student, the only girl in a class of men.
The physical body becomes symbolic of societal gender roles. The young heroine is hates her own physical signs of arising femininity because they seem to doom her to a secondary role, while those born male will be elevated, because of their bodily form.
In the anatomy room, the young heroine notes the huge contrast between man's elevated status when he is alive and his equality with that of a woman corpse, now on this table she can't find the difference she just found the proof that it is society alone that elevates the man. Ultimately, she will encounter many of society's tragedies through her medical work, yet she always looks beyond the physical, for she finds much of the sickness is not in the human body, but in society.
As she experiences death and birth in her patients, she battles with issues of existence. "The focus of the struggle inside me widened out from masculinity and femininity to embrace human-kind as a whole," the storyteller notes, as she tracks a failed marriage and a eventual rise to medical success that still leaves her feeling empty. It was not until years after she completed medical school, during a retreat in the countryside, to a country villa, that she finally lets herself feel, which Saadawi describes in moving prose, presenting the journey from imprisonment to freedom. The story of all the girls whom worked so hard to gain appreciation but found out that there is no roles in this apartheid world
hmm after all that you had read if you read it all!! what do you think i wanna know your openion your comments, deal...?