Woman at Point Zero in Around the World in 80 Books

Oct 16, 2010 Beverly rated it liked it

I rate this book at 3.5
I think students and readers of feminist studies/literature will enjoy this story.
For me the author achieved her purpose of showing the effects of cultures who oppress women to fit into the roles the males in power assign to them.
Also, shows how woman are conditioned into this submissive role and help ensure that other woman stay in this role.
While the story takes place in Egypt - this is an universal approach to the oppresive of women and could/does take place in many soc ...more

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Mar 08, 2020 Nina ( picturetalk321 ) rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: genre-litfic, zchallenge-2020-reading-women, theme-het, author-woman, a-reviewed, z-read-gelesen-2020, transl-arabic, theme-feminist, world-egypt, publdate-1970s

Wow. What a ride of a read. Egyptian feminist, novelist and activist Nawal El Saadawi tells the story (part fiction, part reality, 100% deep truth) of Firdaus who sits in prison and whose life's tale is a string of sadness, oppression and woe. Moving from one man to the next -- father, uncle, husband, lovers, clients -- she experiences nothing but exploitation, disrespect and violence. Yet there are moments of beauty and hope, all the more piercing for their fleetingness: tentative eruptions of Wow. What a ride of a read. Egyptian feminist, novelist and activist Nawal El Saadawi tells the story (part fiction, part reality, 100% deep truth) of Firdaus who sits in prison and whose life's tale is a string of sadness, oppression and woe. Moving from one man to the next -- father, uncle, husband, lovers, clients -- she experiences nothing but exploitation, disrespect and violence. Yet there are moments of beauty and hope, all the more piercing for their fleetingness: tentative eruptions of love; coming second in her school in the secondary education certificate (and seventh in the state) and her fierce pride in this certificate; pride in making her own money and living independently; a love of reading. Yet what avenues are there for this young girl's academic achievements? She is married off to a much older violent and stupid man.

Firdaus, via Nawal El Saadawi, is razor sharp in her analysis of her life's condition. A flavour from near the end of the book:

"The men I hated most of all were those who tried to give me advice, or told me that they wanted to rescue me from the life I was leading. I used to hate them more than the others because they thought they were better than I was and could help me change my life. They saw themselves in some kind of chivalrous role - a role they had failed to play under other circumstances. They wanted to feel noble and elevated by reminding me of the fact that I was low. .... I refused to give them a chance to play this role. None of them was there to rescue me when I was married to a man who beat me up and kicked me every day." (120-1)

Firdaus's story is why we need feminism. And Nawal El Saadawi's prose is how we can bear stories like Firdaus's. Because despite its grimness, this book is a page turner and the prose sings off the page. There is a strange beauty in some of the repetitions, metaphors that echo each other across the pages like the refrain of a lyric. In other places, the writing is stark and blunt. The translation is beautiful and flowing. The translator is named on the title page but no bio is given; google tells me that Sherif Hatata was Nawal El Saadawi's husband, a novelist and a political activist in his own right.

Some of the blurbs in the 2007 Zed edition (Arabic original published in 1975) talk about the book as being an indictment of the Arab world and the Middle East. But to my mind it is an indictment of patriarchy. What is interesting is that nowhere does Firdaus / the author identify Islam, hijab or even the genital mutilation she underwent in childhood as the root cause of her oppression. What is oppressive is a system that allows no independence for women, naturalises violence towards women within marriage and does not treat women as autonomous citizens and human beings. The feminist magazine 'Spare Rib''s blurb hits the nail on the head: 'the story of one Arab woman, but it reads as if it is every woman's life.'

Format: very stiff spine; my arms started hurting from keeping the pages open, and I had to crack spine and covers.

Chosen for the Reading Women Challenge 2020, rubric nr 13: 'By an Arab woman.' ...more

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