Resumo de Woman At Point Zero

Egyptian novelist Nawal el Saadawi obtained her medical degree in 1955
and rose to become Director of Public Health. Her research into
the status of women yielded her first book, Women and Sex, a
non-fiction medical/social study. She was dismissed as Director
of Public Health as a result of the publication of Women and Sex, and
was imprisoned along with a number of other intellectuals under
Sadat. She has worked on researching women in prison, and was
United Nations Advisor for the women''''s Program in Africa and the Middle
East. Besides Women and Sex, Saadawi''''s non-fiction works include
The Hidden face of Eve and Memoirs from the Women''''s Prison. She
is also author of a number of novels, including God Dies by the Nile,
Two Women in One, She Has no Place in Paradise, The Fall of the
Imam and The Circling Game. She currently lives and works in
Cairo with her husband Dr. Sherif Hetata.

Woman at Point Zero distils El Saadawi''''s contempt, hatred and anger
toward patriarchal Islamic Egypt into the life and times of one woman,
Firdhaus, who is awaiting execution at the women''''s prison for killing a
man. El Saadawi bases this novel on stories told her by women
prisoners. Like El Saadawi herself, Firdhaus grew up in a small
southern village, migrated to Cairo and tried to live with dignity and
independence in a male-dominated world. Firdhaus tells her story to the
narrator on the eve of her execution, in a bare prison cell.

From childhood, Firdhaus has known nothing but the brutality of the
patriarchal system, and the low status of females in that system.
She describes her mother as empty-eyed, brutalized by her father.
"No light seemed ever to touch the eyes of this Woman .... One day I
took her head between my hands and turned it so that the sun fell
directly on her face, but her eyes remained dull, impervious to its
light, like two extinguished lamps." (p. 18) Mother has a string
of children who die in infancy. "When one of his female children
died, my father would eat his supper, my mother would wash his legs and
then he would go to sleep....When the child .. was a boy, he would beat
my mother, then have his supper and lie down to sleep." (p.18)

Firdhaus grows up in this female-hating world, sexually abused by her
uncle, punished for questioning her paternity with pharaonic
circumcision, then sent off to live with the abusive uncle when her
parents die. In Cairo, she attends school, does well, and is
quickly married off to an old man when school ends so no money or time
need be spent on her future. She runs away from this abusive
husband into the arms of another abusive man until she is "rescued" by
a madam called Sharifa. With Sharifa she tastes the good life but
not independence. She learns, too, that Sharifa is brutalized by
her own lover/customer. At length Firdhaus becomes an independent
prostitute and understands independence.

Prostitution is preferable to her than marriage - she considers
marriage in that society to be enslavement. As an independent
prostitute she can at least chose the men she sleeps with and kick them
out when they have paid.

When a male friend suggests she is not respectable, Firdhaus quits
prostitution and takes an ordinary job to prove she is a respectable
woman, falls in love with a co-worker and is betrayed by him.
When she learns he has married someone else, she realizes he used her
for sex because he couldn''''t afford a prostitute. She quits her
job and returns to prostitution. Her independence is short-lived
as she is forcibly taken over by an abusive pimp. By this she learns
that she can hcontrolled by men. This is
the man shp; Her elation and calm after killing the pimp
lead her to confront a high-paying dignitary about his using money from
oppressing his own poor to pay for her services. Her contempt for
men comes to a fine point. She hates them all.

Since she was a child she has noticed that men rule the world.
She has studied history and the role of men in ruling and
oppression. She has noticed that women are ruled by fear of
men. Her act of killing the pimp liberates her from that fear -
and the fear of death by execution. In the end she risks her own
life to release herself from the oppression of men, to kill her fear of
them.

When the police come to arrest her, she tells them, "No woman can be a
criminal. To be a criminal one must be a man." (p. 100).
When they tell her she is a savage and dangerous woman she says, "I am
speaking the truth. And the truth is savage and dangerous."
She says of her society "..they are afraid to let me live....my life means their death." (p. 100).

Now, she says, "I have triumphed over both life and death...I want
nothing. I hope for nothing. I fear nothing.
Therefore I am free." (p. 101).

In the beginning of the story she says of her imminent execution, "This
journey to a place unknown to everybody on this earth fills me with
pride. All my life I have been searching for something that would
fill me with pride, make me feel superior ...to ... kings, princes and
rulers." She reaches in the end a place they can''''t own her, abuse
her, make her afraid. She reaches "Point Zero".

Firdhaus comes to the end of her life in triumph. She has killed
with truth, she dies without any more fear. She has struck back
at the patriarchy, at the rulers and princes, the husbands and fathers
and uncles and doctors and policemen, all, El Saadawi seems to be
saying, pimps, men who prey on women, can''''t stand them to be
independent, can''''t stand them not to be sex objects, obedient,
beatable.

El Saadawi''''s singlemindedness in her writings about the status of women
in Egypt permeates both her fiction and her non-fiction. She
correctly identifies religion as an agent of patriarchal oppression in
that country - as it is in so many others. It kills the light in
the eyes of women, as it did Firdhaus'''' mother. El Saadawi''''s own
contempt for the agents of patriarchy is not hidden, it is explicit in
the life and words of Firdhaus. She journey''''s through all the
stages of that oppression, from the devaluation of female children, to
the killing of mother''''s spirit, to sexual abuse by an uncle, to
physical and sexual abuse by a husband, emotional abuse by a lover,
ownership by a pimp. She observes and notes the damage done to
women other than herself. She lives, as do so many women, in fear
of men. She notes their religious hypocrisy, their piety to
Allah, their hatred and mistreatment of women.

Should one take this as a description of life in Islam for women?
Probably not, since it is not, in these extremes, universal. But
it is a picture of the state of women in one Islamic country, where
Islam is a powerful agent in the oppression of women. According
to El Saadawi, it is a woman-hating society, from top to bottom,
peasant to ruler and everyone in between. Woman-hating is
systemic, she suggests. This thesis obtains in her other novels
as well. She seems to have dedicated herself to revealing this
truth, like her heroine Firdhaus. As a writer she risks showing
that society the truth about itself. It is a wonder s

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