Woman at Point Zero

Content Warning: This section includes descriptions of sexual assault and rape, physical violence, and domestic abuse.

A prominent symbol in the novella, eyes are multilayered in what they symbolize depending on context and whose eyes Firdaus is describing. The first person whose eyes stand out to Firdaus are her mother’s, and the way she describes her mother’s eyes repeats two other times during the story:

All I can remember are two rings of intense white around two circles of intense black. I only had to look into them for the white to become whiter and the black even blacker, as though sunlight was pouring into them from some magical source neither on earth, nor in the sky, for the earth was pitch black, and the sky dark as night, with no sun and no moon (17).

Firdaus’s mother’s eyes when she was very small were engulfing and wide and represented comfort and love (“Two eyes that alone seemed to hold me up” [17])—something that she was deprived of the rest of her life. This version of her mother is fleeting; Firdaus mainly recalls her mother as being empty, angry, and abusive.

Firdaus sees the same loving eyes in both