Nawal El Saadawi was trained as a medical doctor, taking her place alongside two other doctor revolutionaries from the global South, Che Guevara and Frantz Fanon—that most human, most distinguished band of revolutionaries. Although happily she lived much longer than either Guevara or Fanon, her radical politics never subsided or eased off even up to her last days: in that, she was also the best kind of revolutionary. There is also something in the texture of her writing that reminds me of Fanon. Reading it, you feel that it is always written through the body: there is a physical, phenomenological, processual form of corporeal thinking and experiencing, made up of objective descriptions of individualized, specific external and internal functioning parts of the body that run seamlessly into a haunting, breathtaking evocation of inner emotions, emotions that are always felt along the pulses and that strike us in a peculiarly powerful...