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Abstract

Nawal Al Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero shows that oppression and exploitation produce destructive effects that cause psychological fragmentation. However, the traumatic experiences that result in the main protagonist’s repeated regression into infancy also allow her to have a better sense of self amidst the workings of the patriarchal system. It is this newfound consciousness grounded in an understanding of the oppressive dynamics of the patriarchal system that eventually empowers and leads the main protagonist, Firdaus to point zero where she reclaims her agency.

Key-words: agency, alethia, feminism, identification, ideology, misrecognition, being, patriarchy, point zero, truth,                                     oppression, inexistent, event, situation, violence.

 

 

Set against the backdrop of a patriarchal society, Nawal Al Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero is the saga of the stoic protagonist, Firdaus who, through her life-journey, grasps the dynamics of the exploitive patriarchal system and eventually confronts “ the multiple manifestations of her culture- punishing masculinities” (Royer 292). This paper focuses on how Firdaus reaches the newfound consciousness which empowers her, and leads her to point zero[1] where her attempt to reclaim agency results in her tragic death.

Firdaus’s life has been charted by the phallocentric script that has made her submit to the dictum of patriarchal order, an order that has summoned her to surrender to the will of her male counterparts, and has coaxed her to entertain unattainable dreams of emotional fulfillment. The string of humiliations, abuses, and betrayals Firdaus goes through are “meted out by father, uncle, lover, policeman, and political activist” thus, implicating “their associated institutions—familial, religious, political—and their sanctioned female violating structures” (Zucker  242). However, her trials and tribulations and her encounters with various breeds of predators make her aware of the dynamics of the patriarchal system. Hence she proclaims her ideological emancipation:

           I hope for nothing

           I want for nothing

           I fear nothing

           I am free (Saadawi 87).

 

The epistrophe “nothing” in Firdaus’s declaration is a sign that she has developed a better sense of what has happened to her. The patriarchal order instilled fear in her so that she would comply with its injunctions. Then it further enslaved her by determining her wants and desires. Her only hope to get out of the shackles of the male dominant society was to pursue ad infinitum a dream of recovering the lost maternal love through a number of substitutes: her attachment to her high school teacher, Ms Iqbal, her love for Ibrahim, and her relationship with Sharifa. Her realization that all these pursuits were in vain is well captured in her freedom proclamation.

Consequently, her level of awareness allows her to exit the confines of nothingness where she was held captive by man. Her freedom is therefore the prologue to her re-composition as a subject who can articulate herstory[2]. From then on, Firdaus lives with the conviction to have recovered her integrity and honor as a woman (Saadawi 91), and her resolve to preserve them is unwavering. Thus, when Marzouk , the pimp appears to her as the quintessential male threat to her integrity, the agent of her schizophrenic spaltung[3], Firdaus kills him in self-defense to preserve the wholeness of her recovered self. After that liberating act, Firdaus feels elated as she proclaims:

My body was light as a feather, as though its weight had been nothing more than the accumulation of fear over the years […] my head held high to the heavens, with the pride of having destroyed all masks to reveal what is hidden behind (Saadawi 105).

 

Her footsteps on the asphalt, she describes as “footsteps of a woman who believed in herself, knew where she was going, and could see her goal” (Saadawi 105). And those confident resounding footsteps on the pavement “proved that she was nobody’s wife” (Saadawi 105). Marzouk’s death follows the unveiling and the confronting of the fears that patriarchy ingrained in her deep psyche.

When I killed I did it with truth not with a knife. That is why they are afraid and in a hurry to execute me. They do not fear my knife it is my truth which frightens them. This fearful truth gives me great strength. It protects me from fearing death, or life, or hunger, or nakedness, or destruction. It is this fearful truth which prevents me from fearing brutality of rulers and policemen (Saadawi 112).

Firdaus’s newfound truth seems to have liberated her from the fear of man that was ingrained in her subconscious by phallocentric institutions. A number of critics argue that in order to achieve self-constitution and freedom, Firdaus needed to challenge the socio-cultural constitutions that used violence to frame her body as man’s property. 

Amira Nouwaira (2009) argues that Firdaus’s truth has far-reaching  consequences as she becomes the voice that “articulates the grievances of women, particularly those of the deprived, underprivileged classes, and their attempts to escape the nets flung at them by the entire society from the day they are born” (64).           Echoing Nouwaira, Irene Salami-Agunloye (2010) reads the novel as a subtle and radical “dismantling of male codes that disguise the Arab/Islamic culture.” The deconstruction of these codes, she further argues, is El Saadawi’s way of challenging “the institutionalized patriarchal culture thereby undermining the dominant phallocentric paradigm in the Arab/Islamic culture” (176). In the same vein, Eustache Palmer (2008) posits that Firdaus       

aroused this animosity from officialdom and quarters because, in the words of Arndt, ‘she probed the oppression of women in Islamic societies and their deprivation of rights with a particular focus on the interplay between sexuality and violence’ and shed historic light on the situation of women in Islam and poke out diversely against the institutionalized circumcision and veiling women (150).

 

Analyzing the impact of Firdaus’s message, Diana Royer (2001) argues that Firdaus’s voice is linked with voices of eternity, disembodied voices that tell stories, speak truths (101).

However, none of these critics tells us what Firdaus’s truth really means with regard to her emancipation and how it fits into Saadawi’s feminist/revolutionary theory and praxis.  Two additional questions that beg answers are: 1) does Firdaus reach point zero with the killing of the pimp? and 2) is her proclaimed truth consubstantial with that event?

The critics rather seem to suggest that Firdaus’s proclaimed truth is tantamount to the Heideggerian alethia that reveals how things are made intelligible.  Furthermore, Firdaus’s alethia, the consciousness that allows her to denounce and indict, heralds the awakening and rebellion of those who have been duped, oppressed, and exploited for so long. 

          I contend that these romanticized readings of Firdaus’s revolutionary stance are amiss for two reasons: on the one hand, they do not factor in Saadawi’s critical analysis of women’s involvement in the political processes in the Arab world. On the other hand, they implicitly argue that Firdaus’s proclaimed truth harks back to Heideggerian alethia, an interpretation that overlooks Saadawi’s critique of the inherent flaws of the Arab feminist movement.

In The Hidden Face of Eve (1982), Nawal Al Saadawi points out that only women’s access to political power can change this undemocratic system based on violence in the Arab world. That change will enable Arab women to make constitutional reforms that will make the legal system less schizophrenic and less contradictory. However, the truth of the matter is that in spite of the increase in the numbers of educated professional women in various professional associations, political parties, and parliaments, no change has occurred. Women still constitute a marginal minority of less than eight percent in those associations. Besides, women are still confined in charitable cultural organizations but are not allowed to form a political force. It is illusory to consider any liberation of women from male tyrannical rule if women have no consciousness of their oppression and exploitation, no political organization, and no economic ability to organize.

          Another pre-requisite to women’s emancipation is correcting the distortion of their socio-historical consciousness which resulted from the falsification of history and the spurious glorification of a past that legitimizes their exclusion, oppression, and exploitation. Saadawi (1982) pertinently points out that “heritage is a tool which all present political forces use according to their interests and perspectives. Yet heritage loses its historical and human meaning if it does not represent all of society” (21).  Saadawi argues that in the Arab world, women who represent fifty percent of the population are excluded from or made invisible in the struggle over heritage. 

Based on Amira Nowaira’s (2009) comments, it is also noteworthy to mention that El Saadawi departs from the early Arab feminists whose discourse generally reflected the preoccupations, views, and assumptions of the upper class (59). Even though these feminists protested against domestic violence, female circumcision, forced marriages, and polygamy, they were not concerned about the masses of uneducated women living in poverty-stricken rural and urban areas and the marginalized women of subclasses such as prostitutes. Challenging the compromises made by the early feminists, Nawal El Saadawi’s stand confronts all the oppressive apparatuses, exploitive mechanisms, and dicta of the patriarchal system. Her works express empathy for lower classes and marginal groups while indicting irrevocably the male dominant system that dehumanizes women and pushes them towards prostitution. Saadawi’s endorsement of the disenfranchised and the downtrodden is germane to her militant feminism that makes her embrace the prostitute as a human being while revealing and condemning unequivocally the conditions leading women to dehumanizing practices.

          For Sadaawi, women’s lack of political capital, their exclusion from the public sphere, their distorted historical consciousness and stolen heritage, the agenda and orientation of the elitist feminist movement contributed to making women inexistent, to use Alain Badiou’s term. With reference to the conceptual framework Badiou developed around the ontology of the inexistent, I will explore Firdaus’s death/deadly truth and show how it departs from the Heideggerian alethia that seems to inform the commentaries of the aforementioned critics.

Badiou’s (2009) ontology stipulates that the being [of disenfranchised people like Firdaus] is to be an inexistent in the world.[…] The multiple-thing is in the world but with an intensity equal zero. Its existence is a non-existence (58). […]On the other hand Badiou argues that [...] “existence is a transcendental degree indicating the intensity of a multiplicity’s appearing in a given world, and this intensity is in no way prescribed by the pure composition of the multiplicity under consideration” (58).

In Woman at Point Zero, Firdaus experiences her status of inexistent through countless rejections and deprivations that are underscored, as I already mentioned, in The Hidden Face of Eve (1980). Inexistence, in Firdaus’ case, is sealed by excision and symbolic violence, a form of violence that maintains its effect through the mis-recognition of power relations situated in the social matrix.  Because of Firdaus’s inexistence, this cycle of violence widens as it “winds outward from the home, to an uncle’s home, a marriage, work as a secretary and finally a life of prostitution” (Zucker  242). Thus within the confines that “erase” them, women are not just at degree zero; they are below degree zero. As a case in point, Firdaus recalls: “When one of his female children died, my father would eat his supper, my mother would wash his legs, and then he would go to sleep, just as he did every night. When the child that died was a boy, he would beat my mother, then have his supper and lie down to sleep” (Saadawi 17).

          For Firdaus’s father, daughters were either objects to be bartered in marriage or domestics toiling and sweating from dawn to dusk. Only in her relationship to her mother would Firdaus ever hope to find affection. Unfortunately, even the warmth she sought from her mother’s body was taken away by the father (Saadawi 16). She remembers that “instead of staying by my side to keep me warm, my mother used to abandon me alone and go to my father to keep him warm” (Saadawi 16). Also vivid in her memory are the summer months when “her father would have his legs washed by the mother" (Saadawi 16) and how as she grew older, her father placed the mug of water in her hands and taught her how to wash his legs. This traumatic erasure of the mother and subsequent replacement by the daughter was all the more acute as she recalls another woman hitting her on her hand and taking the mug away from her, and she remembers:

When I used to look into her eyes I could feel that she was not my mother. They were not the eyes that held me up each time I was on the point of falling. They were not two rings of pure white surrounding two circles of intense black…  (Saadawi 16-17).

 

The hatred that this woman harbors for Firdaus expresses her desire to slavishly satisfy the desire of the male master and subsequently submit to the  process of symbolic identification[4], a normatively circumscribed way of organizing the social space within which the subject’s core and most enduring identity is constructed. As a case in point, Firdaus’s mother and stepmother are identifying with the patriarchal way of structuring social relations between sexes. In the same vein, Firdaus’s trials and tribulations underscore the fundamental aspect of Badiou’s (2008) concept of inexistence that stipulates that “‘to inexist’  is an existential distinction and, thereby, exclusively internal to appearing. The inexistent is simply that of which the self-identity is measured, in a given world, by the minimal degree (60).  From such a minimal degree that is the hallmark of the saga in Woman at Point Zero, can Firdaus herald a truth that can subvert the patriarchal system?

According to Badiou, for the inexistent to be the harbinger of truth it has to fulfill a sine qua non condition: the attainment of a maximal degree of being in a given situation.  The recent events that toppled Ben Ali in Tunisia and Mubarak in Egypt seem to confirm Badiou’s point. The massive riots that occurred in these countries were the thunderous clamor of inexistent, marginal multiples entering forcibly the political arena.

Going back to the emergence of truth from the minimal degree of being, one has to acknowledge that truth emerges as a subversive force and an enduring regime only when, as a multiple, “it is introduced in some sort of supplementary way within the register of appearing” (76). In Woman at Point Zero, the set that Firdaus belongs to is the set of disenfranchised women who are victims of patriarchal rule. The key question is, however, whether Firdaus’s act of revolt is an event that reveals the truth about women’s conditions and, subsequently transmutes into a force that destabilizes the patriarchal system. I would argue that neither  the level of consciousness that Firdaus attains through her life-journey nor her act of killing the pimp are cause for a local mutation that might have propelled women into the socio-political arena. Instead, her execution seems to further bracket her as an inexistent multiple. Firdaus’s tragically short-lived freedom is not the fulfillment of the ultimate liberation she could not attain in life as Amira Nouwaira suggests (70). Neither is her willful enactment of selfhood subverting the status quo. Instead I posit that, to a certain extent, a mutation process unfolds through the psychiatrist telling of Firdaus’s story. While revealing the trappings of the patriarchal system, Firdaus’s narrative stirs our feeling of sympathy for the victims and our revulsion for oppression. It is indeed Firdaus’s very act of speech that becomes her triumph over all adverse circumstances of her life (Nowaira 65).

In fine, one may wonder whether Firdaus succeeded in reclaiming agency. According to Badiou, the question of agency is not so much a question of how a subject can initiate an action in an autonomous manner, but rather how a subject emerges through an autonomous chain of actions within a changing situation. That is, not every day actions or decisions that provide evidence of agency for Badiou. It is rather those extraordinary decisions and actions which isolate an actor from their context, those actions which show that a human can actually be a free agent that supports new chains of actions and reactions. Furthermore, the real subject of truth is this new collective “we,” which comes to be precisely the point where the self is lacking: “The individual is thus, in his very essence, the nothing that must be dissipated in a we-subject”— a we that is itself immortal, eternal, and indifferent to any perishable nature or mortality (Hallward 122-3). The only way Firdaus fulfills such a requirement is by becoming a subject of enunciation, entrusting herstory to the psychiatrist. Thus, Firdaus’s sacrifice is not in vain. Her ultimate opposition to the rule of tyranny is an integral part of the legacy she bequeathed those who act in fidelity[5]with a narrative which challenges the hegemonic patriarchal master-narrative. From degree zero of existence — as inexistent multiple — to point zero and beyond, Firdaus has become, in the words of Badiou, a subject transfigured by the truth she proclaims. By dissipating herself in a project that exceeds her, Firdaus contributes to the constitution of a true collective subject. Beyond point zero, Firdaus’s voice joins the chorus that articulates the grievances of disenfranchised women and their attempts to emancipate themselves from oppressive phallocentric orders.

 

Works cited

-  Al Saadawi, Nawal. The Hidden face of Eve: Women in the Arab World, trans. Sherifa Hetata. Boston: Beacon Press, 1982.

-  ---.  Woman at Point Zero. Trans. Sherif Hetata. New Jersey: Zed, 1989.

-  ---. God Dies by the Nile. Trans. Sherif Hetata. New Jersey: Zed, 1989.

-  Badiou, Alain. Inifinite Thought. Trans. Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens. London: Continuum, 2005 (1).

-  ---.  Being and the Event. London/New-York: Continuum, 2005 (2).

-  ---.  The Second Manifesto of Philosophy. Stafford: Polity, 2011.

-  Hallward, Peter. Badiou: A Subject to Truth. Minneapolis/London: UP Minesota, 2003.

-  Heiddegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany: SUNY Press, 1996.

-  Mijolla, Alain de, ed. International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. Farmington Hills: Macmillan Reference USA, 2005.

-  Nouwaira, Amira. “Nawal el Saadawi’s Woman art Point Zero within the Context of Arab feminist discourse.” Twelve Best Books by African Women. Eds. Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi and Tuzyline Jita Allan. Athens: Ohio UP, 2009: 59-62.

-  Palmer, Eustache. Of War and Women: Oppression and Optimism, New Essays on the African Novel: Trenton: Africa World Press, 2008.

-  Payne, Kenneth. “Woman at Point Zero: Nawal El Saadawi’s Feminist Picaresque.”     Southern Humanities Review (1992): 26 (Winter):11-18.

-  Royer, Diana. Critical Perspectives of the Works of Nawal El Saadawi, Egyptian Writer and Activist. Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2001.

-  Salami-Agunloye, Irene. “All the Rulers are Men: Patriarchy and Resistance in Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero.” Emerging Perspectives on Nawal El Saadawi. Eds. Enest N. Emenyowu and Maureen N. Eke. Trenton: African World Press, 2010: 175-201.

-  Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 2009.

-  Zucker, Marilyn Sluzky. “Killing the Pimp: Firdaus’s Challenge to Masculine Authority in Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero.” Masculinities in African Literary and Cultural Texts. Eds. Helen Nabasuta Mugambi et al. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2010: 237-49.

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