Woman at Point Zero

Nawal El Saadawi, author of Woman at Point Zero, was a crusader for feminist rights in Egypt during the 20th and early 21st century before her death in 2021. She authored several fiction and nonfiction titles that focused largely on women’s health and rights—and helped pioneer a feminist movement across Egypt from the 1950s to 1970s. Saadawi’s importance lies not only in her exposure of feminist ideas that were often kept hidden in Egyptian culture, but also in her international reach and the alternative perspectives she offered the world. Rarely are firsthand accounts available from Egyptian sex workers, given that the profession is both masked by society and considered shameful to discuss. Firdaus’s account provides a completely honest and detailed story about the patriarchal domination that led to an extreme and hypocritical attitude toward sex work in which it was covertly supported yet overtly criticized.

Saadawi’s work and views garnered controversial attention from Egypt, partly because of her open admiration of Western ideals and more liberated outlook toward women’s rights and partly because of her willingness to expose aspects of Egyptian society that most would rather keep secret. She was the first Egyptian author to openly write about issues such as female genital mutilation, incestual abuse, and the sex work that many women like Firdaus resort to in an effort to survive and maintain some control over their lives. Woman at Point Zero was received with controversy in the 1970s and continues to issue the same response today, given that the issues it addresses in many ways remain taboo. At one point in 1981, Saadawi was imprisoned for her honest and unabashed criticisms of patriarchy, and she references this in the novella, writing, “Little did I know that one day I would step through the same gates not as a psychiatrist but as a prisoner arrested with 1035 others under the decree issued by Sadat on 5 September 1981” (ii). Here, Saadawi refers to President Sadat’s mass arrests of political oppositionists—a symbolic gesture that relates directly to the same experiences that Firdaus endured.