Woman Revealed

Nawal El Saadawi, in the first chapter of Woman at Point Zero, sets up an expectation.  She is a psychiatrist, visiting a prison to interview its inmates, and hears of a woman sentenced to death.  She immediately wants to know the woman, Firdaus's, story.  Not only is this the story of a woman prisoner, a woman accused of murder, this is the story of an exceptional woman, though in what ways she is exceptional, the narrator doesn’t yet know.   She knows that she keeps silent.  She knows she has an opportunity to ask for pardon and she does not.  She knows that she is guilty and yet, somehow innocent.  When Firdaus refuses to see the narrator, she makes her feel as though she has been judged, and judged by someone whose opinion matters greatly.  Such is the mystique of Firdaus, so that when El Saadawi finally is admitted into her cramped cell, she feels already that she’s been granted a life-changing privilege.  Firdaus has her undivided attention, so much so that she forgets her surroundings, doesn’t even feel the cold of the floor.

Firdaus’s story is direct, like her gaze.  Her voice, as she takes over the narrative in Chapter 2, is at once poetic and economical.  She reports on her life with a journalist’s detachment.  Using this voice, the author constructs a story that is at first just a collection of memories of feelings, but seamlessly, if methodically, flows into a story of victimization, self-actualization, and hard-won triumph.  

The first images of Firdaus’s life are vague yet startling: a father eating before his starving children, the mother that serves him, the feeling of a cold bed and the feeling of hunger.   The man and woman described are at once her parents and not her parents, perhaps because, as a result of their neglect, the connection between parents and child has never really been forged.  “I sensed he was not my father.  Nobody told me and I was not really aware of the fact. I could just feel it deep down inside me” (18)  She describes a loving uncle, a savior after the death of her parents, whose love is confused and distorted when first he molests her, and then when he chooses a wife who, perhaps sensing the connection between her uncle and his young niece, plots to be rid of her.

As a child and young woman, Firdaus is characterized as passive.  Her uncle takes her from her parents’ house, then sends her to board at school.  She is effectively sold in marriage and her life is a misery of rape, deprivation and abuse.  No sooner has she run away, than she is taken in by a well-meaning stranger, who is in fact a cruel pimp who subjects her to more violence, and in effect, launches her career as a prostitute.  Firdaus is so bewildered and naive, so desperate in these early years, that she often doesn’t realize the danger she is in until it overwhelms her.  

Especially in early years, she is unaware of how she gets from one situation to the next, although throughout her adulthood, the transitions always seem to involve a fleeing into the chaotic streets of Cairo, before being lured into another exploitation:  “I walked through the streets with swollen eyes and a bruised face, but no one paid any attention to me.  People were rushing around in buses and cars, or on foot.  It was as though they were blind, unable to see anything.  The street was an endless expanse stretched out before my eyes like the sea.  I was just a pebble thrown into it, battered by the waves, tossed here and there, rolling over and over, to be abandoned on the shore.” (48)  

Through the chronicle of Firdaus’s misadventures, use of repetition serves to create signposts for the reader.  Firdaus twice finds her self in a courtyard; she is a still figure sitting in darkness and is approached by a compassionate stranger:  “One night a teacher saw me there.  For a moment she was frightened by the sight of a mass that did not move, yet looked like human shape sitting in the dark.” (28) Later, in the office building courtyard, “One day as I sat there one of the employees saw me.  For a moment he was scared by the sight of a dark mass, the size of a human body, crouched motionless in the dark of night.” (83)

Through this repeating description, El Sadaawi reveals Firdaus’s inner life; we see the landscape of her emotion, its colors, its climate.  “My face was turned towards his face, and my eyes looked into his eyes.  I could see two rings of pure white surrounding two circles of intense black looking out at me.  The white seemed to grow even whiter, and the black to become even blacker as though light flowed through them from some unknown, mysterious source, neither on earth, nor in the heavens, for the earth was enveloped in the dark cloak of night, and the heavens had neither sun nor moon to light them up.” (85)  We see in the eyes of Iqbal, Firdaus’ teacher, the eyes of her mother.  We see in the eyes of Ibrahim the same qualities, when finally Firdaus can name emotion she is feeling: love.

When she meets Sharifa, another kind of pimp, what she learns about herself and her world turns the tide in her life.  While she is being sexually exploited by Sharifa, she is taught something new through the experience: her value.  She learns how to impact others by setting a high price for herself.  “Sharifa said to me one day, ‘Neither Bayoumi nor any of his cronies realized your worth, because you failed to value yourself highly enough.  A man does not know a woman’s value, Firdaus.  She is the one who determines her value.  The higher you price yourself, the more he will realize what you are really worth, and be prepared to pay with the means at his disposal.  And if he has no means, he will steal from someone else to give you what you demand.” (58)

El Saadawi characterizes these and similar epiphanies as a series of veils that are lifted one by one from Firdaus’s eyes, until finally, she sees clearly the intentions of others and the societal norms that would seek to enslave her.  Each situation offers her a lesson: what it means to be a woman, what it means to survive, what it means to go beyond mere survival.  When finally we see Firdaus begin to say no, when we see her begin to take back the reigns of her life, she’s become a different kind of woman than she’s ever been.  She leaves Sharifa and becomes an independent sex worker, but when she leaves this life for a brief attempt at “respectability,” she reaches the conclusion that women’s opportunities under a repressive society are only different levels of subjugation.  She returns to a life of prostitution, but on her own terms.  When again an outside force, in the form of yet another abusive pimp threatens to take her hard-won freedom, she kills him, and in doing so, reaches a new plane of existence.  All at once, she is able to see the system fully and clearly, and she holds the key to her freedom from it: 

“I opened the door and walked down the stairs into the street.  My body was as light as a feather, as though its weight had been nothing more than the accumulation of fear over the years.  The night was silent, the darkness filled me with wonder, as though light had only been one illusion after another dropping like veils from my eyes.” (105)

The first description of Firdaus by the narrator is also the last.  The words are the same, and in this final moment, the cadence of the description of Firdaus is akin to a meditation.  The image that resonates for the reader, finally, is Firdaus, the champion.  Alone in her small cell, a condemned woman, Firdaus is radiant with triumph.  She is no one’s slave, she has placed herself above those who would oppress her.  

It is through focusing on universal themes of oppression that Nawal El Saadawi is able to take this story beyond place and time.  One might be tempted to compartmentalize Firdaus’s story as just a Middle Eastern story, or even just a woman’s story, but she compels her reader to examine the institutions in our own lives, and begin to dismantle power structures that systematically disenfranchise individuals in our own communities. Firdaus’s story is nothing less than a call to action.