Here is a way to talk about stories by Hanan Al-Shaykh and Nawal El Sadawi by encouraging you to think about the way a thematic might merge the two stories together under an essay prompt.

The sample essay prompt of the day.
      While the overall purpose of reading world literature is to expand one’s notion of the world, often time writers will use a constrained or limited point of view to give their readers an encounter with a specific set of mind. Write an essay about point of view and what is revealed when an author turns his or her focus on a specific person or group in the way they experience the world. Almost any text we have read can lend itself to this kind of analysis. You may focus on a single work for this essay, or compare two texts that we have read. If you choose the latter option, make sure the comparison is valid.

While that would be the prompt in total, here is an aftermath to help clarify the terms.
     Think, for instance, of Cesaire’s stance as the writer and the native in Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. The way that Niyi Osundare positions himself as Nigerian and poet, or the ways the the positionality of Mariamu eventually comes to the foreground in “Wedding at the Cross.” Here’s another: the way that the narrator of “The Old Chief Mshlanga has a perspective more European than African as she begins her story--she acquires her perspective from books.
But think, today, of today’s work.

Here is a kind of introduction to the essay:
    On the surface, the short stories by Arab women writers in the Norton Anthology couldn’t be much different. Hanan Al-Shaykh’s “The Women’s Swimming Pool is a winsome meditation on a little girl’s dream of seeing the sea, and ranges over the Lebanese landscape, while Nawal El Saadawi’s “In Camera” takes on a very adult theme of torture and domination and takes place in the small confines of an Egyptian court. Yet both authors use point of view effectively to show the constrained, confined consciousness of women in the Arab world, showing how perception and expression are both affected within these confines. The young girl in “Swimming Pool” has no point of reference outside of her tiny village with its tobacco crops, threading tents, and rocky landscape; her vision of the sea, culled from a glass ball and stories, is a place of inestimable beauty. The young adult woman, Leila, in “In Camera” has her point of view narrowed by afflictions on her body wrought by torture from her jailer and by the confined space of imprisonment and trial.
     The girl in Al-Shaykh’s story seems to attain all her desires. She gets a glimpse of the sea, “more beautiful than it had been in the glass ball,” and is about to enter the space of the cherished women’s swimming pool. Ironically, her expected paradise closes down almost immediately, as the weight of her past and family is enacted in the realityof her grandmother's presence outside the pool area. There is likewise an irony in “In Camera.” One might assume that through their methods, the brutal State workers have shut down the voice of the poor abused prisoner. But through the trial, her voice is heard even if secondhand, through the judge, and it is a voice that meets with the approval of the population, as they applaud the words that she uttered. As an individual about to be taken to a closed hearing, Leila seems doomed, but as a force that has dared to stand up against the Ruler and his apparatus of domination, she has succeeded. In creating this character, Al Saadawi manages to suggest that yes, there is a place for women in the political life of the nation, and, no, a woman isn’t defined by what is between her legs.

Here are some outline plans for supporting paragraphs:
     Paragraph that describes some of the limits of the child’s perceptions in Al-Haykh. Her most vivid and available images in the tobacco threading tent, contrasted against her powerful imagination. Maybe show how her imagination allows her to ignore the signs of physical distress of her grandmother.
     Paragraph that describes the limited perceptive power of Leila--especially her eyesight. Having the reader experience this trial though her vision allows it to become understood only gradually, which lends it more power than a vivid and complete description would.
     Final concluding paragraph a meditation on the concept of freedom--maybe with the assertion that Leila has managed to find some freedom for herself while inside the awful prison apparatus of her nation, while, in having her most fervent wish granted, the little girl realizes her own imprisoned kind of existence.

Nawal El Saadawi (b. 1931)

     The story is written in a very constrained style, and may be difficult to follow. Lets trace the plot first, and then suggest why she presents this story in the manner that she does.
     The story centers around a young girl who is now on trial having been exposed to some of the more brutal kinds of torture imaginable. There are some explicit descriptions of some of the torture, others are hinted at, more are left to our imagination.
     It is also a family story, since the mother and father at least, and maybe the little sister, are in attendance at the trial.
     Part of the trial backfires on the judge, and the gallery of onlookers applaud at the description, supposedly originating from the girl, of the country’s dictatorial leader as “stupid.” They agree with such enthusiasm that it causes them to applaud and cheer. The judge, moreover, is accused of at the least, allowing this moment to happen,, and it is as if he had made the statement about the leader’s stupidity. In the end, the trial is moved out of the public eye, the hearing will be conducted in camera.

     Omniscient narrator with four privileged perspectives: the girl, her mother, her father, and the judge and other officials presiding.
     I think the girl’s perspective is fascinating. It demonstrated the constrains on perception, and certainly on expression, that the body in pain experiences. The first paragraph is almost abstract, ussd synaesthesia to show the assault on the senses, senses which are in a damaged condition.
There’s another technique that seems to show that the body is broken, dispersed even. It is a collection of parts. “she felt the seat with the palms of her hands,” “the muscles of her face relaxed,” “her lips curled into a feeble smile,” etc.
“her eyes were beginning to catch the sound of voices and murmurings.” I need to check on whether that is a typo--should it be ears?
Even her fear of other human bodies is expressed as fear of body parts: “legs inside trousers, feet inside shoes.”

What else stands out in the composition of the story? Well, there is a preoccupation with the animal, and the distinction of the animal from the human. The girl seems to have been reduced to the state of a “small animal” at the bottom of page 1106 (then she asks this question about whether animals know of the “existence of something called God.” We wonder how and if her own knowledge of and concept of God survived the ordeal.) The judge is described in descriptors, similes that suggest animal. Smooth heads as red as monkey’s rumps. Eyes round and bulging as a frog’s, nose curved as a hawk’s beak, etc.
The ruler is even described, at first, in terms of the part body--first of all the shoe. We travel in her description from the shoe upward until we get to the face.

The moment when her name is announced and brings her to a vague recollection of who she used to be is startling and desperately effective That strange name, by which she used to be called. There is nothing of her present condition, even of her own body, that resembles that young girl who used to be called Leila Al-Fargani.
Remembering the day of her arrest, there is an echo of the first sentence of this story. The first thing she felt, the first thing she remembered. Relationship with the mother. The mother, for whose pain she was responsible. There’s this “what’s politics got to do with you?” question. But if you look at the representation of the father, he versed her in the politics of the nation and the national leaders.
Then there is this eruption of sound, which she cannot identify, due to the damage done to her body. It may be that laughter is unrecognizable to her, or even applause. And we see how diminished she is when she wonders how people can applaud a statement like the great leader being stupid.

The second section is taken over by the consciousness of the mother. Later we will read a stanza of poems by Anna Akhmatova that shows the mother at the center of suffering under Josef Stalin’s rule in the Soviet Union. Here the mother’s body is shown to be forever attached to the body of her daughter, a body now disfigured and wracked with pain. 3,025 hours is something like 126 days=4 months. Counted by the mother in agonizing hours--days too large a block of time when this is experienced, months are unthinkable.

After another interlude from the girl’s consciousness, we have one from the father’s As we’ve suggested, there is a different social expectation for mothers and father’s. At first this one is a kind of triumph, as he is able to see his daughter as a kind of heroine. At first he hears the applause as a kind of tribute to himself as her father--“I’m Al-Fargani who fathered her and whose name she bears.” But moments later stories of her violent rapes are rehearsed, and shame overwhelms him, his own name is now unutterable, and he is the social being who believes that this kind of shame is unbearable. We read the girl’s pain as determining her perceptions and thus her expressions, and the father’s own limitations as a human also constrain the way e is able to think about everything that is occurring and has occurred.

In the final section from the girl’s consciousness, we read with some horror that it was when she was being gang-raped that she spoke aloud about how stupid “the one who leads you” is. And this is the utterance the judge has fastened upon for the central notion of the trial. Mistakenly so, we realize, as the judge himself undergoes his own kind of trial.