I'm not usually one to re-read a novel, even one's I greatly enjoyed the first time around. But when the great Egyptian novelist and feminist campaigner Nawal El Saadawi died a few weeks back I had the urge to re-read The Fall of the Imam. I read this shortly after it was first published in translation in the late 1980's, and remember being mightily impressed by it.
What I remembered from the first time was present still. Its looping mesmeric narrative that keeps returning to one point in the story - the female protagonist Bint Allah stabbed in the back whilst trying to escape murderous unnamed pursuers. Each time approached from another different angle, background or person's perspective. You hear of this world expressed through the perceptions of a variety of characters - the Imam, his legal wives, his mistresses, his childhood friend The Great Writer, the Official Leader of the Opposition. In some way they all become blurred into the many facets and satellites of the one omnipotent Imam.
Saadawi's great achievement is in creating the feeling of eyes watching you everywhere. The narrative slips from third to first person and back without note. One might say dreamlike in its logic, but this is like inhabiting a oppressive nightmare, where no one, not even the Imam, is who they make themselves out to be. The Imam, whatever he actually is, has this controlling force upon everyone's lives.
The subservient role allotted to women is justified by a cyclical theological logic. Women cannot be trusted to think nor act for themselves, because they are always to be considered as the instruments of Satan. From the point of view of the many women he beds, the Imam they know is a sin riddln fallen man. They just cannot reveal that because there would be fatal consequences for them.
You could murder the Imam, but the Imam is not really one person, he's a constructed demagogue of the imagination, an icon representing eternal religious truths and prohibitions. The incumbent is merely the vessel through whom those are presently enacted. And, of course, the world and power structures upholding the Imam are entirely male dominated ones. No one can win when faced with them, least of all a woman.
The Fall of the Imam, is not then a straightforward nor comfortable novel to read. It has thematic links drawn from The Thousand and One Nights. A magic realist quality of returning to tell the reformulated tale yet again. I can imagine it testing the patience of anyone looking for a more linear form of writing. I remain touched by the dense dark poetry and imagery. It portrays this unreal reality, a world completely in its own bubble separated and deliberately cut off from ours, cultish, dangerously deluded and cruel. It was certainly worthy of re-reading, sad and brutish as it is, there is some hope there too struggling to break out and be heard, to breath freely with a liberated mind.
CARROT REVIEW - 6/8
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