This is not to suggest that Woman at Point Zero is devoid of optimism. Gloomy as it all might sound, through Firdaus’s inward transformations, the book invites us to experience some of that emboldening freedom ourselves. With its relentless truth-telling and steely defiance of patriarchy, it cuts holes in the gossamer of despair in which it entangles women.

This is what make Firdaus’s story essential to feminism. However, her predicament sets Firdaus free because, to quote Janis Joplin, “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose”. The story of Firdaus is one of a life bereft of choice. Instead, Woman at Point Zero takes a refreshingly ideological and polemic stance toward choice, namely that the fact that a woman chooses something does not mean that choice is necessarily feminist. While the contexts may be specific to Arab society, the core theme of the book – feminist awakening – resonates across time and cultures.įurthermore, Woman at Point Zero is a story about one of the key feminist topics of our times – choice, though it stands in stark contrast to the lifestyle-oriented feminist writing so popular today – where anything from prostitution to labioplasty to wearing a hijab can be considered feminist as long as it is a woman’s choice. She goes on to tell a harrowing story of growing up poor, of being raped by family members, of being genitally mutilated, of being married off as a teenager to a 65-year-old, of being beaten up time and again, of taking to the streets, of becoming a prostitute, and eventually of having had enough, and of murdering a man, leading to her imprisonment. I have no time to listen to you,” Firdaus begins. She has been agitating against the oppression of women, including genital mutilation, since the early 1970s.Īlthough fictional, Woman at Point Zero is based on a true account of a woman awaiting execution in a Cairo prison. Saadawi, who is now 84, trained as a doctor in her native Egypt and was imprisoned by President Anwar al-Sadat in 1981 for alleged “crimes against the state”.

The woman at point zero