Composition concepts and practices

Nawal el Saadawi & Nadine Gordimer

In "A Modern Love Letter," Nawal el Saadawi takes her readers into the culture of women -- Arab women, in particular, wherein the oppressive nature the society and religious community that they live in is primarily patriarchal and functions for the welfare of men only. Through a letter, el Saadawi seeks to deviate from common notions that her society holds for women, and she begins to tread towards this path by writing a love letter -- a task that is commonly assumed by males. The love letter, it turns out, is not addressed to a specific individual exclusively, but addressed in general to al Saadawi's society. Throughout the letter, the author shifts her audience, addressing at times, the women, while at the latter part of the letter, it becomes clear that she is boldly addressing the male sector.

In the love letter, the author talks about the inability of women, (like her) in general, to express and understand their feelings about the oppression that their sector experience, a plight that becomes inevitable because of the social forces that maintain women's subjugation, which is through the dominance of men with the support of cultural and religious norms that holds women as unequal to men in Islam (society and culture). The author expresses her struggle against this injustice, illustrating her protest as follows: "[d]eep inside me there was a violent movement, stillness and quiet on the surface...I awoke from sleep but you remained where you were beside me." The last line reflects her disagreement over women's subjugation: 'awakening' is interpreted as women's awareness of their oppression, but this 'awakening' is subsumed by the persistence of social and cultural norms in the rigidly conservative and patriarchal society el Saadawi lives in.

The most dominant theme that emerges in the African and Middle Eastern literature is the blatant oppression and subjugation of women from men. Similar with Nawal el Saadawi in "A Modern Love Letter," Nadine Gordimer's "A Soldier's Embrace" reflects how within societies where numerous differences and dichotomies exist, it is the women sector who suffers the most, and these sufferings further escalate if, apart from being females, they also belong to other marginalized sectors in the society (e.g., the poor sector, colored people, the elderly, among others).