Session 1: Women's Identity in Prison
Chair: Robert Perkinson

Nawar Golley - 'Memoirs from the Women’s Prison' by Dr. Nawal El-Saadawi
Department of English, American University of Sharjah, Sharjah , United Arab Emirates

When el-Saadawi's Memoirs of a Woman Doctor was published in 1957, she was at the beginning of her literary and medical career. Since then, she has written many medical and literary books on issues of sexuality and sexual and social discrimination against women, especially in Arab countries. By the time she wrote her Memoirs from the Women's Prison (hereafter referred to as Prison, MWP) in 1981 the year of her imprisonment and subsequent release, she was already a well-known figure within the Arab World, and her reputation was extending abroad. Unlike the first memoir which publicizes the private life of a female fictional character, Prison is a memoir which makes public aspects of the life of an already well-known public figure, the writer herself, and her prison experience. This experience is itself already a public one in the sense that the writer is not confined to solitary imprisonment but shares the same prison with hundreds of other women, both political and ordinary prisoners. One of the issues I shall discuss in this paper is how the private and the public are merged in Prison, and whether the public aspect of the experience has dictated the kind of "I" the writer uses and the type of consciousness to appear in the autobiographical narrative. I shall see whether el-Saadawi has represented in her project a political self, well aware of its own identity and accomplishments, and whether this self has preserved a sense of uniqueness or whether her political experience allowed for some development of a collective consciousness and identification with other women.

If Memoirs of a Woman Doctor is a breakthrough in Arab literature, not as a genre, but in its content and feminist spirit, then Prison is indeed a leading book of its kind too. For until 1981, political memoirs by Arab women were rarely found. It is by no means, however, the first prison memoir ever written by an Arab woman. In 1972, a political memoir was published, written by an Egyptian woman, Zaynab al-Ghazali al-Jabeli, who founded the Muslim Women's Association in Egypt in 1936. Al-Ghazali wrote her memoirs about her six years imprisonment in the Cairo war prison, from 1965 to 1971, under Nasser for charges of collaboration with the Muslim Brothers. From outside the Arab world, prison memoirs by women became available in Arabic translations. Angela Davis's memoirs, for instance, which recorded her political experience inside and outside prison, became known to the Arab public in early 1977. Although el-Saadawi is by no means the first Arab woman to initiate a prison memoir, nonetheless she had only a limited corpus of conventional models of political narratives to follow.

Download Full Conference Paper -

Velinka Grozdanic and Ute Karlavaris-Bremer - A Written Word from Women’s Prisons Regarding Socialisation

A sentence of imprisonment exists in all modern systems of criminal law sanctions. Having in mind that this sentence is realized only in a process of its execution, the execution presents its crucial phase. Relatively high standards applied in the regime for execution of a penalty of deprivation of liberty (especially in women’s prisons) are established by legal regulations this day as a result of general civilizing achievements to respect human rights and to protect those who are sentenced. Nevertheless, we are still facing the issue whether it is possible to prepare a person deprived of liberty for the life in liberty. That is to say, isolation, segregation, locking up in special institutions with detailed rules of conduct, which are essentially different from life demands in a social community, create an artificial and unnatural life environment. After a certain period of time, breach of social communication and in general having no contact with the life out of prison walls leads to internal lack of liberty and more severe psychical, emotional, intellectual and more often health problems. In everyday routine and monotony of the convict existence deprived of having choices, making decisions and being challenged and responsible, writing becomes one of the most truthful modes to preserve and protect personality. It secures connections with the outside world and it is a way of nourishing the sensibility of woman’s nature in rigid prison rules encirclement. Making a decision to express herself by a written word, woman is leaving her passive role of being an object and becomes at least partially an active party of her own resocialization while beginning to communicate with herself and the world that surrounds her. In such a manner, woman maintains and even develops her creative potentials. A possibility to express her deepest feelings, fears, desires, hopes, considerations, critics… provides for her the energy to survive in conditions of isolation. These possibilities, as a part of the organized program for resocialization, exist only in some women’s prisons. This article analyses available texts written by women prisoners in female incarcerations in Germany, Slovenia Macedonia and Yugoslavia.

Download Full Conference Paper -