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Nabila Jaber (review date winter 2001)

SOURCE: Jaber, Nabila. Review of A Daughter of Isis, by Nawal El Saadawi. Arab Studies Quarterly 23, no. 1 (winter 2001): 81-4.

[In the following review, Jaber recommends A Daughter of Isis to readers, stating that the autobiography is expertly written and thought-provoking on issues of gender relations and racism.]

Seeking a temporary respite from death threats back home and agonizing over living a status of exile in North Carolina, the author takes up the project of writing her autobiography as a way to make sense of her existence. Now over 60 years old Saadawi engages in the process of self-reflection while consciously challenges her representation of “self-life-text” against time and memory. “Rediscovering the past” is fused with the present, adding a layer of uncertainty and complexity to the life she seeks to retrieve/undo. How she perceives the past and what discourses...

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1. Introduction
2. Criticism
   1. Miriam Cooke (review date spring 1986)
   2. Sara Terry (review date 5 September 1986)
   3. Miriam Cooke (review date winter 1990)
   4. Louis Werner (essay date 25 June 1990)
   5. Lucasta Miller (review date 19 July 1991)
   6. Kenneth Payne (essay date winter 1992)
   7. Nawal El Saadawi and Angela Johnson (interview date March 1992)
   8. Evelyne Accad (review date spring 1992)
   9. Nawal El Saadawi and George Lerner (interview date April 1992)
   10. Ramzi M. Salti (review date spring 1993)
   11. M. D. Allen (review date summer 1995)
   12. Nawal El Saadawi and Pat Lancaster (interview date December 1997)
   13. Nicki Hitchcott (review date December 2000)
   14. Nabila Jaber (review date winter 2001)
   15. Earl G. Ingersoll (essay date 2001)
   16. Marilyn Booth (review date January 2003)
   17. Ilona Lo Iacono (review date February/March 2003)
3. Further Reading
4. Copyright