One day, at the age of ten, Nawal El-Saadawi was sent to put on her cream dress. such a thing was special in their poor household, in the huddled village of Kafr Tahla in the delta of the Nile. Her father, she was told, had a guest for her to meet. So she put on the cream dress, but also smeared raw aubergine on her teeth to turn them black. That way the guest, who was meant to be her future husband, would never, ever want to marry her.
在尼罗河三角洲卡夫塔拉拥挤的村庄里，一天，家人让十岁的纳瓦勒·萨达维穿上她淡黄色的连衣裙。换装对这个贫穷的家庭来说有特别的意义。家人告诉她，父亲要她见一位客人。于是她穿上了淡黄色连衣裙，还在牙齿上涂上生茄子，好让牙齿变黑。那样的话，这位注定要成为她未来丈夫的客人，就打消了想娶她的念头了。
She got a beating for it, but it worked, and that first victory gave her strength for the rest of her life: giant self-belief, and she needed it. Her campaign against the oppression of women in Egypt, from genital mutilation to routine marital thrashings, from puny inheritance rights to the wearing of the veil, hurled her against the authorities. Her writing was censored, her books banned.
她为此遭到一顿打，但这种方式挺见效，第一次胜利为她余生提供了力量支撑：强大的自信，而她需要这种自信。她发起的反对埃及妇女压迫的运动，从割礼到司空见惯的婚姻暴力，从微不足道的遗产继承权到女性被迫戴面纱，以上种种让她不得不与当局“为敌”。她的作品受到审查，她的书籍遭到封禁。
“Women and Sex”, published in 1969, cost her her job in the ministry of health. Eight years later “The Hidden Face of Eve”, which spared no details of the cuttings she had seen as a doctor in the villages, shot that taboo into general conversation and herself into electric peril, like a field of mines.
1969年出版的《妇女与性》使她失去了在卫生部的工作。八年后，她在《夏娃隐藏的一面》一书中将在乡村当医生时看到的割礼细节披露无疑，也将这个禁忌话题变成了大众谈资，让她自己身陷雷区般的危险境地之中。
In 1981 Anwar Sadat’s government jailed her for three months, and in the 1990s death threats sent her abroad. Each time, like a winning horse, she cleared every obstacle. In prison, while the other women wept, she sang, danced and wrote a memoir on toilet paper, using a smuggled eye-pencil. When her publisher in 2007 burned her play in which God was out-argued and gave up, she declared that if she said all she wanted to say she would be burned herself, like Joan of Arc.
1981年，安瓦尔·萨达特(Anwar Sadat)政府将她囚禁了3个月，90年代，她迫于死亡威胁不得不移居国外。每一次，她都像一匹获胜的马一样，跨过了每一道障碍。在监狱那段日子，当其他女人哭泣时，她唱歌、跳舞，用偷偷带进来的眼线笔在厕纸写回忆录。2007年，她在剧本里说真主被压制并且认输，出版商就烧掉了她的剧本，她宣称，如果她说出了她想说的一切，她就会像圣女贞德一样被烧死。
