To live as an object of ridicule and abuse for a patriarchal culture.
To have little refuge in dedicated service to career or schooling. To feel your first sense of individualism and personal fulfillment in the shackles of prostitution.
And finally to glimpse personal worth at the very hour when your life will be taken.
These are the tribulations of the Egyptian woman Firdaus, a murderer devoid of remorse who will meet her executioner in a matter of days. She endures abuse,rape, genital mutilation, homelessness, prostitution. Her most soul-wrenching defeat, however, is being told that she is not "respectable". Through the rich story-within-a-story framework of Woman at Point Zero, the allegorical character barely impacts the page at her first introduction. She is transparent and ghost-like, as if she is already a spirit , perfectly resigned to barely owning her own existence at this point. She begins to share her story with a young female psychiatrist (presumed to be autobiographically based on El Saadawi), who has doubts as to her own worthiness in her professional endeavors as an Egyptian woman seeking commonalities for a dialogue on the female experience.
Though there are no blatant references to tenets of faith or political underpinnings that may be used to perpetuate the mistreatment of females, the use of scene from small village to cosmopolitan Cairo and the presence of the Nile itself indicate both historical context and the age-old plight of misogyny. Firdaus also sets up independent practice as a high-class prostitute along the banks of the Nile. The money and the deception of having choice for the first time in her life empower her and she mentions being able to peel away masks from her countenance. They may represent throwing off acceptance of a system that seeks to keep her meek and inferior. She may be dropping her layers of oppression and innocence in order to finally shine before being snuffed out.
Concerning her perceptions of physical presence, she chooses to imagine the setting of an eclipse in the penetrating eyes of the people who have made her feel love and hope. As the whites of their eyes and their equally dark centers expand to her imagined sizes of earth and sun, they meld together and become dark and indistinguishable. It seems as if she is looking for something mystical, for the magical realism of natural phenomena to shake up her life.
Only through inflicting violence and smiting a man who seeks to control her does she truly feel she has been released from the bondage of the tunnel vision of oppression. She has executed her first and last show of dominance.
