i survived

Nawal El Saadawi’s intense story inside of a story (and Firdaus’s story inside of a story) and its telling reminds me a bit of this show called I Survived. It’s a show like many others: folks live to tell their stories of surviving, for example, kidnapping, rape, flood, fire, gunshot wounds to the head, hijacking, you name it. What keeps my interest is the ways the stories are recalled. We know from the title the people survive – we know the ending, so the stories are more about how one survives and less about the fact that they survived. This notion’s not a new one; like in some travel writing and many a memoir, it’s more about the journey and less about the destination.

Like Woman at Point Zero. At the outset, we know Firdaus dies, we know the ending, so what keeps our interest? Save the fact that we’re reading for class (and we do want to know who she killed and how and why), what else keeps us flipping pages? Without drawing thick lines between the three, maybe, I’ll explore the story, then the story inside of a story, then the story inside of the story inside of the story.

The set-up seems simple: woman researcher sets out to hopefully hear from and see “a woman who had killed” (x). El Saadawai must return to Firdaus’s prison many times before Firdaus agrees to see her. Prior to Firdaus’s allowance, El Saadawi ventures inward and contemplates the difference between the “prisoner” and herself: “It looked to me as though this woman who had killed a human being, and was shortly to be killed herself, was a much better person than I. Compared to her, I was nothing but a small insect crawling upon the land amidst millions of other insects” (3). So begin the metaphors and what complicates (in useful ways) the “set-up” – the connection(s) between the two women. What we go on to learn about is the parallelism between the two, a parallelism that seems at times to rely on the metaphor.

The first instance of this parallelism happens early in Firdaus’s telling. She uses simile to illustrate how she feels upon returning to her father’s home, then metaphor to further illustrate: “Back in my father’s house I stared at the mud walls like a stranger who had never entered before. I looked around almost in surprise, as though I had not been born here, but had suddenly dropped from the skies, or emerged from somewhere deep down in the earth, to find myself in a place where I did not belong…” (15). In moving back to when Nawal first discovers that Firdaus “knows” and “senses” Nawal, the parallelism becomes clear through the use of metaphor, through this image of coming from beneath the earth. Nawal speaks: “A strange feeling of heaviness weighed down my heart, my body, drained my legs of their power. A feeling heavier than the weight of the whole earth, as though instead of standing above its surface, I was now lying somewhere beneath it” (5). Nawal continues by using an example that further connects the two women by feelings of unbelonging and opposite of men: “I had fallen in love with a man who did not love me. I felt rejected, not only by him, not only by one person amongst the millions that peopled the vast world but by every living being or thing on this earth, by the vast world itself” (5). Firdaus experiences this, too, with Ibrahim.

It’s drenched in a heaviness, then, that we move through Firdaus’s story, forgetting about Nawal. Firdaus tells with such awareness, awareness we talked about in the context of Brett Lott’s piece. She seems a master in the art of paying attention, and even when she loses awareness (moves in and out of it), she pays enough attention to show us what it’s like. As with a heaviness, we move, too, with awareness told through simile and metaphor (the elmaz set-up). I see such figures of speech as awareness, yes, and defense mechanism, perhaps, or ways of seeing and communicating a larger world from underneath the weight of it, all possibilities that drive this narrative forward from end to beginning to end.

A large portion of simile and metaphor are at work surrounding Firdaus’s attention to eyes, sometimes personified, and how they shift: “Every time I tried to walk, I fell. A force seemed to push me from behind, so that I fell forwards, or a weight from in front seemed to lean on me so that I fell backwards…But I kept falling, buffeted by the contradictory forces that kept pulling me in different directions, like an object thrown into a limitless sea…Forever sinking and rising, sinking and rising between the sea and the sky, with nothing to hold onto except the two eyes. Two eyes to which I clung with all my might. Two eyes that alone seemed to hold me up” (16). It’s of course from Firdaus’s eyes that we watch her through objectivity and subjectivity. And she fails to see as well, through metaphor: “There I was, just a pebble which someone had tossed into its waters, rolling along with the crowds that rode in buses and cars, or walked the streets, with unseeing eyes, incapable of noticing anything or anyone. Each minute a thousand eyes passed in front of me, but for them I remained non-existent” (43). Or does she fail to see?

Firdaus also objectifies herself, and then separates mind from body, but then returns to objectify through language: “I kept my eyes closed and abandoned my body. It lay there under him without movement, emptied of all desire, or pleasure, or even pain, feeling nothing. A dead body with no life in it at all, like a piece of wood, or an empty sock, or a shoe” (53).

Onto the story inside of Firdaus’s story. I see this functioning similarly to Fierce Attachments: El Saadawi lets Firdaus tell her story (could it really be any other way?) and Firdaus often steps back to let others speak. A most notable example is when Firdaus hears her uncle and his wife discussing Firdaus’s fate beginning on page 36 and we don’t return to Firdaus’s narration until the end of page 39. Because we’re placed within the story of the story, this seems to be Firdaus’s decision (in telling, not crafting). I guess I’m wondering what this moment (and others like it) looks like in the prison cell, Nawar watching and listening, wondering if this caught anyone else off guard (no pun intended), wondering what’s lost (if anything) in recording oral accounts, wondering how much Nawar had a hand in Firdaus’s telling, wondering if this even matters.

When “Firdaus’s voice suddenly fell silent,” we’re reminded of the connection between the women, a connection through telling and surviving the telling and language, figures of speech: “What lay under me was not a bed, but something solid like the ground, and cold like the ground, yet with a coldness which did not reach my body. It was the cold of the sea in a dream. I swam through its waters. I was naked and knew not how to swim. But I neither felt its cold, nor drowned in its waters” (113). And just as Nawal closes with how the story impacts her, I, too, feel an urge to do so. This story is like “An infernal circle whirling round and round, dragging me up and down with it” (99).