El Sadaawi is Pretty Courageous...

Woman at Point Zero is a great example of how fiction and non-fiction overlap. It reminds me of Dave Eggers’s What is the What—also a novel based on the events of a real person’s life. On the inside flap of What is the What (but not the cover), under the title it says “The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng.” Can a book be both a novel and an autobiography? I appreciate that El Sadaawi makes it clear that Woman At Point Zero was based on someone’s life, and gave Firdaus credit in the preface; in it she writes: “she stood out among the others, vibrated within me, or sometimes lay quiet, until the day I out her down in ink on paper and gave her life after she had died.” Knowing that it is true makes the impact greater because of the violent, abusive, and oppressive nature if it. Even though it is fiction, there is no distance or comfort to be had in the idea that the events are made up.

It’s difficult to discuss the craft of this because there is no way of knowing how this book was made, how much is Firdaus, how much is El Sadaawi, how much is made up. It seems apparent that El Sadaawi only speaks as herself in the first and last chapters. I wondered as I read chapter one why she was so affected by Firdaus’s refusal to see her, and how she gathered from the refusal that Fidaus was better than her. I didn’t understand the moral comparisons. It seemed at first that she was interested in Firdaus for selfish reasons, she writes “…as they spoke of her complete indifference to everything, her attitude of total rejection, and above all refusal to see me, the feeling that I was helpless, and of no significance grew on me. (3)” In the last chapter, she does this again: “I felt ashamed of myself, of my life, of my fears, of my lies….And at that moment I realized that Firdaus had more courage than I. (108)” Why the comparison? What does this do?

Her desire to speak to Firdaus and the rejection she felt after was not unlike the way she describes men’s reactions to Firdaus when she said “no.” She wrote: “A man cannot stand being rejected by a woman, because deep down inside he feels a rejection of himself. No one can stand double rejection. (89)” In fact in chapter one, she writes “could that mean she thought she was better than the Head of State?” on the next page she says, “[w]hen she refused to see me had she known who I was, or had she rejected me without knowing? (3-4). Later in the story, Firdaus does in fact reject the Head of State, she writes “his refusal made him even more intent on gaining victory over me.(90)” In this way, El Sadaawi as a character in the novel, makes herself a they in a way, a person who is both allured by and afraid of Firdaus’s confidence and her power to reject; by purposefully implicating herself, she makes Firdaus the hero of this book, giving her story alone almost the entire book.

El Saadawi frames and contextualizes the story in chapter one. She inserts herself and sets up the story so that the reader is prepared to listen to Firdaus speak. Firdaus carries the rest of the entire novel, and then El Sadaawi comes in again to at the end to give context, place us in the present, and reinsert herself into the story. Where does she fit into all of this? How is she impacted by Firdaus’s incredible truth?

The voice is strong from the very first sentence that Firdaus speaks. “Let me speak. Do not interrupt me.” In terms of the way she crafts the book, I tried to pay attention to the exposition, and the points when I thought El Sadaawi spoke, made connections, and built metaphors. There was some interesting repetition of certain moments: the way sexual pleasure was described (“a far away yet familiar pleasure coming from an unknown source. p 26”), the way rape was described (each time she is raped someone “bears down on me,” and the scenes in which Firdaus fell in love (her school teacher and Ibrahim). I am not sure if this a result of translation, but I think the repetition was interesting and had a rhythmic effect, that said to the reader “notice this.” Despite what she suffered, Firdaus was a hero, not a victim. This book is brave beyond belief. I disagree with the last sentence “…Firdaus had more courage than I.” It took courage write, print, and put her name on this story.