A few weeks ago, a friend sent me a clip from a 2015 event at De Balie in Amsterdam. Nawal El Saadawi — the late Egyptian feminist writer, physician, and activist — is on stage. A Palestinian woman in the audience begins a question by referencing “the Middle East.” Saadawi interrupts before the question is finished.

“The minute I hear ‘Middle East,’ I become upset. Because this is a colonial language.”

The woman tries to continue, but Saadawi stops her twice more: “Not Middle East. Just a second.” She will not let the term pass.

Her argument, in full: Egypt was called the “Middle East” relative to London; India was the “Far East” — also relative to London. Both were British colonies. The naming convention is Eurocentric by design. Then the reversal: when she goes to London, she says she is going to the “Middle West.” When she goes to the United States, the “Far West.” People laugh. But nobody laughs when someone says “Middle East.” For Saadawi, this asymmetry is proof that we have internalized the colonial framing so deeply that the original terms feel neutral while the reversed terms feel absurd. She proposes alternatives: North Africa. West Asia. North West Asia. “We need to decolonize the language,” she says. Then: “Go on.”

Watch the exchange on YouTube

Saadawi was an Egyptian feminist writer and physician who knew this history firsthand. But her argument illustrates something that reaches far beyond this one exchange — how language bundles description and judgment, and how that bundling shows up everywhere from geopolitical discourse to the dinner table.