“Do you prefer oranges or tangerines?”

“I’m not saying that fiction has the magnitude of an earthquake, but when we’re reading a good novel we leave our small and cozy apartment behind, go out into the night alone and start getting to know people we have never met before”

I enjoyed listening to Elif Shafak’s TED talk “The Politics of Fiction.” I don’t believe I’ve ever really thought about the expectations foreign writers faced. I never connected the pressure they must feel to deliver something they don’t even know is expected. Shafak made so many wonderful points in her talk, but there were certain parts that really made me stop, catch my breath, think, and then accept; fiction does indeed transport us out of our comfort zone and into a world we’d never thought to experience before. It gifts us the experience of the unknown and the free.  Shakaf says in her talk that “There’s a gap between the mind and the tongue” and I don’t know about you, but I have dedicated the majority of my educational career learning to build a bride to skip on between that gap. And I have only gotten as far as I have because I have had the pleasure of being taught be radical thinkers. Those that didn’t tell me what to think or how to get there, but showed me the raw and gritty reality of things with a simple “Now go out and understand it.” Something Shafak touches on in her talk as well.

Reading is important. It is our gateway into our own personal “other” that which we do not know or yet understand. I mean, really, what would Harry have done?

Politically and historically, in the entirety of the history of woman, an educated -well read- woman is a dangerous, if not murdered woman. The story of Malala Yousafzai is one I’ve always trembled at. Not with fear, not with a sense of “Oh little girl, why didn’t you just stay silent”, but with anger. Why wasn’t she protected? Why isn’t her death more of an outcry? Is the murder of children such a norm? it’s sickening that our world is so distorted that a child’s voice caused so much of a stir to inspire such malicious actions. But what does that say about our future as a woman? Malala isn’t just a “global icon” she, her story, should be a global tragedy.

Woman At Point Zero

“Let me speak. Do not interrupt me. I have no time to listen to you,” (Saadawi 9). Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El Saadawi didn’t inspire sadness in me, at least not a deep one. I do feel saddened by the circumstances of Firdaus’s life. I didn’t see Firdaus’s story as “depressing” either. What I did feel was sympathy and joy. A woman oppressed that escaped her horrors each time, lived as she pleased, and dies by her own accord. That is strength. That is a fanciful reality.

What is Firdaus’s reality? She has cracked some sort of a code. A code which makes her a force, something to fear, something to be stopped, or in the books case, executed. (History seems to repeat itself rather comically. depressingly. How many women have died, and will continue to die, at the collective hands of a cowardly man? we’re the shit, men, get over it)

“Her voice was now silent, but its echo remained in my ears, like a faint distant sound. Like the voices one hears in a dream” (Saadawi 113) but her lessons aren’t in her death, but in herself made ability to choose…” I felt ashamed of myself, of my life, or my fears, and my lies. The streets were full of people bustling around, of newspapers hanging on wooden stalls, their headlines crying out. At every step, wherever I went, I could see the lies, could follow hypocrisy bustling around. I rammed my foot down on the accelerator as though in a hurry to run over the world, to stamp it all out. But the next moment I quickly lifted my foot and braked hard, and the car came to a halt. And at that moment I realized that Firdaus had more courage than I” (Saadawi 114). The courage that Firdaus displayed, is courage many of us as women lack, including myself at times. I think about the times in which Firdaus lives, she had so much more to lose, and I am not talking about her life. As a woman living in my today, I could not imagine the fear and pressure she must have felt, and I could not fathom the strength it took for Firdaus to live as she pleased.

She lived and died by her choice.

Firdaus knew what she was fighting for. Do many?  In her interview for The American Prospect by Garance Franke-Ruta Saadawi says that she “is also trying to warn Egyptian women that the Westernized mores they are adopting may be no more liberating than the traditions they are leaving behind. She decries makeup as a “post-modern veil,” which leaves women just as focused on male ideas of female self-presentation as the head scarves Muslim women wear.”

Do we actively exercise choice? do we consider how it may affect us? those around us? these days, I actively choose to not make choices. I wake up in the mornings, things occur here in between, and then I close my eyes to sleep (remind me to revisit this).