ABSTRACT
In her work The Woman in the Muslin Mask: Veiling and Identity in Postcolonial Lit-
erature, Daphne Grace notes that:
Despite her controversial reputation, El Saadawi remains one of the most
influential and outspoken writers of both fiction and non-fiction in North
Africa. Although her fictional works are arguably not ‘refined’ enough to
rate as major works of literature, her themes are both revolutionary and
provocative. The very fact that her texts sometimes reads as ‘raw’, also
perhaps adds to the immediacy of the subject matter.1