Term Paper on "Feminist Diversity"

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Feminist Diversity and El Saadawi's WOMAN at POINT ZERO

Descriptions of Female Degradation within Egyptian Novelist Nawal Saadawi's Woman at Point Zero (1998) and their Broader Feminist and Cultural Implications

Throughout the world today, fiction, film, politics, the Internet and the mass media alike have all, albeit in different ways and for different reasons, taken a dim view of the particularly inhumane treatment of many Muslim women within southern areas (e.g., on the African continent) where Islam is practiced. The Egyptian woman novelist Nawal El Saadawi (1931-), who is also a doctor by profession and a feminist by philosophy (as reflected in her writing) has written many works, fictional and non-fictional, on women's unequal treatment by men within Islamic societies. Among them is a stark, disturbing, poignant novel, Woman at Point Zero (1998 [first published 1975]) that tells of Firdaus, an Egyptian-born perpetually abused woman who (out of desperation) becomes a prostitute, and from there, one day resorts to murdering a pimp. It is only due to her desperate circumstances that Firdaus commits this murder, and (as El-Saadawi clearly also implies), such desperate circumstances, especially given the cold detached way Firdaus is treated within the judicial system, are not uncommon, or even frowned upon by the men in charge.

Moreover, Firdaus herself is neither an evil person nor a hardened criminal (or a criminal at all, except in the sense of having also been driven by desperation into being a prostitute); Firdaus is simply a chronically abused, rejected, degraded and humiliated 20th century Muslim woman in Egypt who arrives at "Ground Zero" on one especially unfortunate day. Within this story, Firdaus's degrading experiences both exemplify and underscore the degradation of Muslim women like herself generally, whose repressive and cruel societies under male-dominated fundamentalist Islam make it impossible for such women to catch a break in life, from anyone (including even women and girls); anywhere, or for any reason. Within this book, Nawal El-Saadawi illustrates how state-sponsored development (e.g., 20th century Egypt's attempts at "modernization" of all except women's rights under Islam, as practiced there, or of any of the social, cultural, religious or (strictly) patriarchal cultural guidelines that might have both assisted and guaranteed that modernization as well) and state-sponsored religion (in this case Islam) address or fail to address gender inequality and achieve rights for women.

One of the major strengths of El Saadawi's Woman at Point Zero (1998) is that, while it does not and cannot (nor could any novel) explore woman's plight under Islamic male domination exhaustively or comprehensively, it does still clearly imply and vividly, starkly illustrate the tangible end results, albeit fictionally but also very powerfully and convincingly, of the degradation of women in Egyptian and, by association, other Northern African (and Middle-Eastern general) societies dominated by Islamic males. However, as Esposito and Haddad (1997), also point out, about women living in Islamic societies in general:

The study of women in Islam and Muslim society is complex, reflecting the diverse and varied realities of Muslim women and Muslim societies...

Alongside ideals embodied in the Qur'an and the traditions (hadith) [sic] of Muhammad, one must look at the actual condition of Muslim women in diverse time periods and sociohistorical [sic] contexts. The status of women in Islam was profoundly affected not only by the fact that Islamic belief interacted with and was informed by diverse cultures, but also, and of equal importance, that the primary intepreters [sic] of Islamic law and tradition were men religious scholars or ulama [sic]) from those cultures.

Within Egyptian writer's Nawal El Saadawi's Woman at Point Zero (1998), the main character, prostitute-turned-murderess Firdaus, reveals, after-the-fact, to an interviewer, the stark details of how, exactly, she had, long before turning to either prostitution or violent crime, been mistreated all of her life, within the society in which she has been raised. Eventually then, and after having been, continually, physically and emotionally abused by society and kin alike with no sympathetic ear to turn to anywhere she goes, Firdaus moves, slowly but (El Saadawi implies) also inexorably, toward psychological and emotional "Point Zero," i.e., murdering a pimp who symbolically represents (and underscores) the blind eye Firdaus's whole society has turned to her, and the horrific accompanying, desperation-induced, result of that.

Firdaus, as El Saadawi also implicitly but very clearly suggests (and repeatedly illustrates) is chronically unlucky. Such awful luck as hers, though, as El Saadawi also illustrates abundantly throughout Woman at Point Zero (1998) is not all that hard to come by here. Firdaus has simply been unlucky enough (like myriad others) to have been born female into a society that severely undervalues and as a consequence degrades females. Her "Point Zero" is not all that far for a woman who has been through all she has, to have finally arrived to. It is, after all, Firdaus's accumulated lifelong experiences of laving neglected and abused [all of this quite acceptable; perfectly legal, and even overtly admired within individual her own family and the cultural itself, within this patriarchal Muslim society.

Within the title itself, El Saadawi, however, does not use Firdaus's name, but instead the word "woman"; in this way, the author implies that, while this is Firdaus's particular sad story, it could as easily be the sad story of another woman, or of many other woman. To be "woman" is to embody the general conditions of possibility that allow, indeed even invite perhaps within cultural, social, and religious environments like this one, such brutal, harsh, and overall unfortunate life stories to take place at all.

Long before that, though, Firdaus had already long ago forgotten, her interviewer learns, anything she had ever once known, if she ever did at all, about how to feel or to hope. Her society, after all, clearly views her as nothing but an object rather than a human being equal to men, and that is also how she has come to feel (or, more accurately, how she has come to the point (i.e., "point zero") to the point of being unable to feel anything emotional or personal at all. Her memories of the major events of her life (which consist of, along with being abused, neglected, and abandoned, moving from one place where she is not wanted to another) are a blur; nothing is worth remembering vividly because to have memories would just be to recall trauma she would rather forget.

Understandably, then, Firdaus does not even recall moving from her abusive uncle's home to the home of her abusive husband. This is because, as El Saadawi also implies, Firdaus's life before and after these junctures has all been tantamount to just one solid experience of uninterrupted abuse, the particulars of which are too painful to even recall: "I do not know how I put up with life in my uncle's house, nor do I remember how I became Sheikh Mahmoud's wife," Firdaus states, for example (El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero, 1997).

Further, the dehumanizing society within which she was born, lives and works, and that so condemns Firdaus for being a prostitute without also condemning the social circumstances that brought her to that point does not see her as its victim; she is simply a prostitute, and now she is a murderer to boot. Firdaus's life story is of interest only to one other woman, a stubbornly inquisitive career psychologist, who hardly represents mainstream Egyptian society. If not for her interviewer's persistent efforts, we would not know Firdaus's story at all. She is, after all, but a prostitute and a murderer, and in the eyes of her society, those two facts alone adequately explain everything that needs to be known about her.

Through her interviewer's efforts, though, we learn that Firdaus, early on, had watched her father abuse her mother. Later, she had also undergone forced circumcision, and after that, she was also subjected to constant molestation by her uncle. Next came further abuse, emotional and physical, at the hands of Sheikh Mahmoud; followed in turn by betrayal by a series of lovers, and finally, severe exploitation at the hands of pimps. Along the way, Firdaus is ridiculed and belittled being who and how she is for various reasons: by schoolgirls; by men; by women; by the police.

But that is only words, not physical abuse; but of that Firdaus has clearly also suffered an enormous amount. Before Firdaus ran away, for example, El, Saadawi tells us that Firdaus's husband "got into the habit of beating me whether he had a reason for it or not." From that continuous mistreatment and torment, Firdaus flees to her uncle's house, but shortly after arriving here, it also becomes clear to Firdaus that her mistreatment at home is something her uncle fails to find disturbing or even unusual, and that this, therefore, is not someplace she will find any sympathy. As Firdaus recalls, within the story, to her interviewer after she has committed murder and is telling the interviewer about the various incidents that eventually led her to… READ MORE

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