SOURCE: Miller, Lucasta. “Without Doubt.” New Statesman and Society 4, no. 160 (19 July 1991): 36.

In the following review, Miller discusses El Saadawi's travelogue My Travels around the World, which she contends is a mixture of travel writing and autobiography designed to fight oppression.

Doctor, writer, UN representative, and, for a time, political prisoner, Nawal el Saadawi has been a rebel with a cause since childhood. From the moment she stamped her foot and rejected a frilly white dress for a toy aeroplane, she was determined to escape the limited role assigned to the daughter of a traditional Egyptian family. Her new book [My Travels around the World.] is a mixture of autobiography and travel writing. Through dialogue, description, and political commentary, her trips abroad take on the flavour of a personal crusade against oppression.

But however liberated the author may be as a person, the way in which she transforms her...