An Interview with Fatheya El Asaal (Interview‪)‬

Translated by Maysa Hayward The dramatist, memoirist, and social activist Fatheya El Asaal lives in a special way. She lives the moment with its dynamic details and takes in everything, like a camcorder recording life in her memory. In the moment that an idea ripens and cries out to be born from inside of her, she takes paper and the words flow, weaving in her embrace a distinct literary work. Fatheya El Asaal excels in narrative, playing the trickster with her readers to draw them to the last page of her story. She plays with feelings, ridicules fixities, and faces with seeming feminine weakness the steel social representations that oppress women. In mid-November 2003, El Asaal went to the Philippines as the keynote speaker to the Sixth World Conference for the Rights of Women Writers, a conference drawing a large number of female writers from around the world. Fatheya El Asaal is unique in that she addresses all issues with honesty and truth; she never negotiates or compromises the principles of rights for women and the liberal political stand that has positioned her as a governmental opponent for the last thirty years.