Egypt

women at point zero

by Nawal El Saadawi

Nawal El Saadawi was born in a small village outside Cairo in 1931. Unusually for a women of her time, she was educated alongside her brothers and graduated from Cairo Medical School in 1955 with a specialization in psychiatry. Saadawi’s writing was inspired by her experiences treating female patients in her medical practice. She was a vociferous critic of the Arab world’s treatment of women, and was imprisoned in, and exiled from Egypt for her outspoken politics. Saadawi’s searing indictment of society’s brutal treatment of women continues to resonate, even beyond her death in 2021.

WOMAN AT POINT ZERO was one of Saadawi’s earliest novels. Set in a prison, the book unfolds in the form of a conversation between two women, a psychiatrist and a prisoner, on the last night of the prisoner’s life. The prisoner, Firdaus, is condemned to death after committing a murder, and she takes the opportunity for one final conversation to unburden herself of her tragic life, asking the psychiatrist to, “Let me speak. Do not interrupt me. I have no time to listen to you… Tomorrow morning I shall no longer be here.”

What follows is the tale of Firdaus’s slow but certain descent from a neglected child who is orphaned and passed from one abusive guardian to another, until she finds her own kind of independence and power working as a prostitute. Saadawi’s story perfectly illustrates how women in patriarchal cultures are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Firdaus’s choices are molded and defined by the behavior and entitlement of men who, she learns as a very young girl, will take whatever they want from you, whenever they want it, even the men you trust are supposed to care for you. Having been bullied and abused until the only currency Firdaus has is her body, she is then judged and condemned by the same men who visit her, for the choices she has been forced to make.

The story is presented as fiction but described in the forward as creative non-fiction and was written by Saadawi through her real life case studies of Egyptian Women in prison in the early 1970s. Despite Firdaus’s the tragic circumstances of Firdaus’s life, she is confident and unapologetic about the life she has lived. Clear that she is in this situation because society has collaborated in her demise, she defies any condemnation of her choices. She spits on the photographs of powerful men she sees in newspapers, not because she knows each individual man, but because she knows their type. She knows what men are capable of in a culture that never demands consequences for a man’s behavior, but punishes women instead.

“…every single man I did get to know filled me with but one desire: to lift my hand and bring it smashing down on his face. but because i am a woman I have never had the courage to lift my hand.”

Nawal El Saadawi was recognized in Egypt and in much of the middle east as a valuable contributor to feminist conversations, work she remained committed to throughout her life. She was an author, a  doctor, and a government official, although she lost her job in the Egyptian government due to political pressure from officials who considered her views and opinions on the oppression of women as a threat, which led to Saadawi’s imprisonment in 1981 for “crimes against the state”. She was the first Egyptian woman to write publicly about female genital mutilation (a theme explored in WOMAN AT POINT ZERO) something the author experienced herself at age 6. 

“They said, “You are a savage and dangerous woman.” I am speaking the truth. And the truth is savage and dangerous.”