She beat this drum for decades. In TV debates she would try to fill every minute, desperate to deliver her whole manifesto.She dreamed of a pan-Arab women’s movement of peasants, professionals and factory workers, mobilising to force change.As far as she could see, there were no proper feminists left; those she had met in America seemed to tolerate husbands even more brainlessly macho than Egyptian men.She was feted in the West, and her exile in the 1990s was spent teaching at Duke University in North Carolina.But the West was still the colonising enemy.In 2011 she naturally went to Tahrir Square to demand the toppling of Hosni Mubarak,whom she had meant to run against in 2005 until he banned her from media appearances: pointing a furious finger, tossing her mane of white hair.But she denounced the Muslim Brotherhood, when they won democratic elections the next year,as capitalist patriarchs tied to Islam and abetted by the West: unacceptable on every count.Better just to shout all the more.On a childhood visit to the seaside once, forbidden to bare her chest to the sunshine like her elder brother,she had watched the weed floating in the sea and felt her anger growing inside her.The shoots were a tender green at first, like the weed, but gradually turned blue, then black.
