The Mega in the Big Questions

Nawal El Saadawi’s, “Woman at Point Zero”


Nawal El Saadawi’s, “Woman at Point Zero” is told in first person. Firdaus begins: “Let me speak. Do not interrupt me. I have no time to listen to you. Tomorrow morning I shall no longer be here.” (p. 9). The setting is in Qanatir Prison. The prisoner Firdaus is about to be executed. Firdaus’s voice is fierce, solid and unwavering. She is condemned to death. She has little time left. I am drawn to her. Firdaus commands the reader’s complete attention: “Let me speak. Do not interrupt me.” Immediately, the reader is alert and must trust the narrator.

The Mega in the Big Questions
How much can a child, a student, a young woman, a wife, a prostitute, a worker and a woman who finally risks herself to love – how much will one person endure and survive? Saadawi gives the account of one woman, Firdaus. She is thoroughly intrigued and mystified by Firdaus. Saadawi reveals at the end of the novel that Firdaus is more courageous than she could ever be. And although she has only just met her in the prison cell, a couple hours before Firdaus is executed, Saadawi seems to intimately know Firdaus.

Through the prison doctor and the warder Saadawi hears about Firdaus. From the prison doctor: “You will never meet anyone like her in or out of prison. She refuses all vistors and won’t speak to anyone. She usually leaves her food untouched, and remains wide awake until dawn.” And from the warder: “Murderer or not, she’s an innocent woman and does not deserved to be hanged. They are the ones that ought to be hanged.”

Firdaus’s describes a childhood where she endured poverty, physical hunger and hard work. Where she witnessed her siblings die off like little “chicks.” Where her father was brutally selfish and ate all the food while her mother and siblings went to bed hungry. She describes in vivid detail how her father ate the food and how he beat her mother.

Firdaus ponders the big questions early in life: “Who was I? Who was my father? Was I going to spend my life sweeping the dung out from under the animals, carrying manue on my head, kneading dough, and baking bread.” (p. 15)

Running throughout the novel was an eerie sense of not belonging, of not being in the right place that Firdaus experiences. She feels like a stranger in family. She believes that her mother goes missing and a stranger takes her mother’s place. “My mother was no longer there, but instead there was another woman who hit me on the hand and took the mug away from me. My father told me she was my mother.” (p. 17)

“Back in my father’s house I stared at the mud walls like a stranger who had never entered it before. I looked around almost in surprise, as though I had not been born here, but had suddenly dropped from the skies, ore emerged from somewhere deep down in the earth, to find myself in a place where I did not belong, in a home which was not mine, born from a father who was not my father, and from a mother who was not my mother” (p. 15).

An eeriness of not belonging in a family, of being the stranger not only in her family but when she became a stranger in her uncle’s house or when she is forced to marry a man three times older than herself or when she is working for Sharifa her entire being becomes a stranger to herself- she can no longer feel, smell, see or hear: “One morning I opened the widow as usual, but the Nile was no longer there. (p. 60).” She works day and night and the many men that come to her bed “crucified” the life out of her.

Through out the story Firdaus is searching, seeking, the world is full of injustices, ugliness but she has a fierce hope about her life. She doesn't seem to be of the world or her culture or have any alliances to her country. But her tenacity of spirit is always propelling her to look for herself, to find herself, to make some sense of her life, to seek independence and liberation from the hells she's living under. She deeply questions the subjugation and oppression of women. She questions why things are the way they are. She points out the double standards between men and women. She makes a compelling argument that a prostitute has more freedom and prosperity than a wife or a worker.

In just 114 pages the novel seems to address the biggest questions of one’s humanity. How Firdaus endured her family, a forced marriage, the kidnap and rape by Bayoumi where he imprisoned Firdaus as a sex slave, the poverty in her childhood, the betrayal of Ibrahim, the sexual abuse by her uncle, prostitution, the injustice and double standards between men and women and in the end Firdaus was able in her final hours to possess a fierce dignity and fearlessness is beyond words.