3. The Physician and the Prostitute

Woman at Point Zero: A prostitute convicted of murder and awaiting execution speaks. Her name is Firdaws, Paradise, yet her life seems the earthly antithesis of that other world.^[1] Her story is spellbinding. Just as riveting is the literary creative process that gives birth to her discourse. An external physician narrator, a Shahrazâdian character already familiar in El Saadawi’s fiction—here, a psychiatrist—draws out the story of the prostitute.^[2] Prostitution, sexuality, religion, politics, male-female roles, even a lesbian subtext: these are the ingredients that, mixed together with a hauntingly repetitive style, create a world-class narrative. Woman at Point Zero (Imra’a ‘ind Nuqtat al-Sifr) is perhaps the most dramatic and accessible novel penned by Nawal El Saadawi. It is also the one that has generated the greatest interest among Western critics working with the translated text.^[3]

Memoirs of a Woman Doctor illustrated the literary ambiguities inherent in a work entitled Memoirs in which the first-person narrator remains unnamed and, like the work’s author, is a female physician. Despite these features, Memoirs is not an autobiography. An intrusive first-person narrator also enframes the haunting Circling Song (see Chapter 4).

Nowhere in the Saadawian fictional corpus, however, is the problem of the biographical and the novelistic clearer than in Woman at Point Zero. Indeed, critics have had too great a tendency to see this masterpiece in biographical and documentary terms. Firdaws’s meeting with the external narrator–psychiatrist thus becomes a meeting directly with Nawal El Saadawi.^[4] Firdaws “assures the author” of her acts.^[5] Is El Saadawi herself partly to blame here? In her introduction to the English translation of the book, she explains the circumstances that led to the writing of this work. There was indeed a prostitute in the Qanâtir prison, there was indeed a meeting between this prostitute and Nawal El Saadawi, and there was indeed a telling of her life by this prostitute. That prison is the one El Saadawi would herself enter as a prisoner in 1981.^[6] The odds seem to be overwhelmingly in favor of the narrowly biographical.

Such a judgment, however, would reduce a superior work of art to a documentary, to occult its literary characteristics. In her author’s preface, El Saadawi consistently refers to the work as a novel. El Saadawi could just as easily have penned a case study of Firdaws, as she does with other female cases in Woman and Psychological Conflict.^[7] But no. For only in a novel, Woman at Point Zero, can the prostitute’s narrative and her relationship with the psychiatrist-narrator come to full bloom. The novelistic form is no textual accident.

The external narrator begins by explaining her interest in the case of one of the prisoners, a prostitute. But the prisoner is elusive, refusing to see anyone, and even refusing to sign an appeal of her sentence. The prison doctor assures the psychiatrist that he himself does not believe Firdaws is a killer: “If you look in her face and eyes, you could not imagine that this gentle woman could kill.”^[8] Firdaws does eventually agree to speak to the psychiatrist; the bulk of the novel, then, consists of her telling of her life story.

Firdaws comes from a poor family. Clitoridectomy is performed on her young body. Her paternal uncle, a traditionally educated Azharite, molests her. He does look after her education, however, and takes her with him to Cairo after she is orphaned. When he marries his Azharite teacher’s daughter, Firdaws is sent off to boarding school. There, she participates in a political demonstration, becomes infatuated with a female teacher, and graduates with superior grades. The problems arise when she is back in her uncle’s house. Firdaws overhears a conversation between her uncle and his wife over her future: the university is not only too expensive, but it will also allow her to mix with young men. The solution? Marry Firdaws off to her step-aunt’s maternal uncle, Shaykh Mahmûd. Yes, he is retired, but he is alone, and the step-aunt does not feel that he is too old for Firdaws. The young woman runs away. But at night she does not know what to do. Two eyes are watching her and she is frightened.

Before we know it, Firdaws is married to Shaykh Mahmûd. He is over sixty, she is not yet nineteen. The old man is not only physically repulsive, but he is an incredible miser as well. He watches his young wife incessantly to make sure she wastes nothing, even searching the garbage for anything thrown away. On one occasion, he finds a piece of food in the refuse and beats Firdaws in punishment.

Firdaws runs away again, this time to her uncle’s house. There, she is told that men beat their wives, especially religious men. This brief interlude is followed by her return to Shaykh Mahmûd. More beatings and misery lead Firdaws to run away yet again.

She lands in a cafe, whose owner, Bayyûmî, takes her in, and she lives with him.^[9] When she sees a group of schoolgirls and tells them that she has a secondary school degree, they take her for a madwoman. She confronts Bayyûmî with her desire to work, but he beats her and locks her up in the apartment. Then comes the use of Firdaws’s body by Bayyûmî and his friends.

A female neighbor helps Firdaws escape, this time on the road to prostitution. She meets Sharîfa, a woman to whom she tells her story and who then takes her under her wing. Sharîfa, whose name means Honorable One (its implications, along with those of the name Firdaws, Paradise, will be analyzed below), is a madam who initiates Firdaws into the profession, at the same time providing her with luxurious physical surroundings. The experience is a rebirth for Firdaws. Sharîfa teaches the young woman the hard truth about men and life.

A prostitute’s existence is no holiday, Firdaws and we learn. She never goes out of the house, day or night, but remains “crucified on the bed.” One trick follows another—until Fawzî comes along. Firdaws overhears him speaking to Sharîfa about her. He wants to take her away, but Sharîfa will not allow it. Is he a pimp? We are not told, but we do know that he has already taken one of Sharîfa’s other girls and that he partakes of the madam’s body as well.

Firdaws does not wait but takes the occasion to run away. A policeman propositions her. She refuses, showing him her secondary school degree. He threatens to turn her in and, after exploiting her, does not even pay her for her services.

Once again on the street, in a downpour, Firdaws gets picked up by a rich man in a car, who, however, does pay her ten pounds for her favors. This is a turning point in her life. She realizes the worth of money, she is able to eat her fill, she is able to get a clean house with a library in which she places her framed degree. At age twenty-five, she becomes her own boss.

Things seem to be going well for Firdaws until Diyâ’ comes along. In bed, he wants to talk. She replies that he will have to pay like anyone else. He replies sarcastically: “As though I were in a physician’s office! Why don’t you hang a price list in the waiting room? And do you also have a quick examination?”^[10] Firdaws asks if he is making fun of her profession or that of a doctor. Both, responds Diyâ’. Finally he declares that the major difference between the two occupations is that that of Firdaws is not respectable.

This assessment convinces the prostitute to reevaluate her life. She attempts to escape sexual slavery by working in an office as a secretary.^[11] She falls in love, only to meet with disappointment when the man in question marries the boss’s daughter. Firdaws returns to the streets, becoming a successful and sought-after object of men’s desires. When a pimp attempts to run her life, however, she ends up killing him. She is taken to her execution at the end of the narrative. In the epilogue, the psychiatrist concludes that she herself is no better than the prostitute.

The physician narrator begins her literary frame with the assertion that “this woman is real, of flesh and blood.”^[12] This “real” woman, the voice that will enter the narrative and control her own saga, is defined first and foremost through her body. The physicality that the psychiatrist highlights in describing Firdaws will in the end sustain the narrative.

The reality of this prostitute murderer is, however, problematic: her narrative entrance and exit are couched in uncertainty. When the female jailer runs to the psychiatrist to announce the good news that Firdaws will talk to her, the physician likens the jailer’s voice to the voices one hears in dreams,

…and her mouth also became big, and her two large lips move in front of my eyes like two panels of a large door that is opening and closing, and then opening and closing.^[13]

The lips/panels of the mouth/door, indicating a repeated opening and closing, are an eloquent metaphor for the oral process that will follow. The female jailer is but a herald for things to come. In fact, the psychiatrist will enter Firdaws’s narrative through her mouth/door.

But the jailer’s large lips and large mouth also stand for woman’s vulva. Firdaws’s narration is announced through woman’s body, and it is through, and for, the body that she will articulate her own saga. The vaginal metaphor is extended as we discover that the narration takes place in a hermetically sealed cell, a womblike structure whose window and door are closed. The two women are the only things in it.

This vaginal space is also a space of water. The psychiatrist imagines that the coldness she feels from sitting on the bare floor is like that of the ocean she swims in as in a dream.^[14] This dreamlike oceanic world in which the naked psychiatrist is swimming, though she does not know how to swim, is reminiscent of the “underwater world of the woman artist’s imagination,” heralding a “submarine lesbian utopia” that Jane Marcus discusses in her analysis of Virginia Woolf.^[15] The dynamics of the Saadawian universe differ, but Firdaws is most certainly a siren luring the psychiatrist with her voice. It is her orders to the medical practitioner that transport the latter into that dream universe and into the potentially enclosed world of the homosexual couple.

The real fluidity of water also allows for another fluidity, in narrative roles. The psychiatrist is able to cede her place to the prostitute as she becomes the listener to the tale. But the physical space that is created for the two women and in which they will both share in Firdaws’s saga is also a narrative space that will engender a potentially lesbian relationship.^[16] The closeness, the privacy in the womblike atmosphere that is the hallmark of Firdaws’s narration, is but an external sign of the intimate relationship established between prostitute and psychiatrist.

Firdaws’s initial refusal to see the psychiatrist unleashes a host of emotions in the medical professional. Her sense of involvement is intense. Unable to move, she feels that the earth is on top of her and not she on top of it; the sky becomes like the earth and is also pressing on her:

A feeling I did not experience in my life, but once, and several years back, when I loved a man who did not love me. His refusal of me became not the refusal of one human being in a big world full of millions of humans, but the refusal of me by the entire world, with all that is in it and all who are in it.^[17]

When the female jailer announces Firdaws’s willingness to see the psychiatrist, her feelings swing in the opposite direction. The physician is elated, the sky is blue, and she feels that the entire world is hers:

A feeling I did not experience in my life, but once, several years back, when I was in love for the first time, and I went for the first appointment to meet my lover.^[18]

She straightens her clothing before going in to meet Firdaws.

In her reaction to the prisoner’s refusal and then willingness to see her, the psychiatrist has delineated an important bond between them: that of lovers. This is not a case of mere fascination on the doctor’s part. The entire episode has sexual overtones. The gender of the lover in her comparisons is clearly identified: it is male.

Redefining the prisoner-psychiatrist duo in terms of lover and beloved is pivotal in the narrative. It smacks, on a most superficial level, of a homosexual encounter between the two females. The attraction on the part of the psychiatrist is clear, the underlying sexual tensions are present. Whether Firdaws is party to this redefinition, however, remains a mystery.

An intricate game of sexual roles and reversals takes place in the prologue (and in the epilogue as well). The physician begins the narrative as the active member who initiates the discourse, who will give the prostitute a chance to tell her life. This superior position is not maintained for long, however. Firdaws becomes the lover, assuming the active role and converting the hitherto active psychiatrist into the passive beloved, initially scorned and then satisfied. The prostitute narrator becomes the active member of the duo.

This “male” Firdaws fits her role well. When the physician first faces her, she feels

as if I had died in the first moment when my eyes met hers. Two killer eyes, like a knife, penetrating/piercing, deep, steady.^[19]

This penetrating knife is certainly phallic; but it is also violent, echoing Firdaws’s murder of a pimp, committed with a knife. The instrument, as we shall see below, will be made to pierce the male body over and over again, in a final triumphant show of reverse sexual penetration.

Concomitant with this role reversal between physician and prostitute is a parallel shift in the discourse. The psychiatrist, whose existence permits Firdaws to articulate her own narrative, becomes the passive listener to the prostitute’s saga. Never does this medical practitioner interrupt the story to ask a question or to alter the flow of the discourse. Rather, the opposite takes place. Once the physician has entered that hermetically sealed space, she herself becomes the subject of Firdaws’s orders: “Close the window”; “Sit on the ground”; “Let me speak and do not interrupt me.”^[20]

The relationship that unfolds between the two women, with its sexual subtext, does not come about easily or without resistance on the psychiatrist’s part. She must constantly remind herself that she is “a scientific researcher.”^[21] But perhaps this is part of the function of the dreamlike state introduced with the jailer’s voice (“like the voices I hear in dreams”)^[22] and maintained in the prologue and the epilogue. The psychiatrist sits on the ground of the jail cell. She is “as someone who moves while asleep.” The ground under her is cold, but with a coldness that does not reach her body, “like the coldness of the ocean in a dream.” Firdaws’s voice is “like those voices which we hear in dreams,” seeming to come from afar though they are near, or to come from close by though they are far away.^[23] The uncertainty of their provenance (from up or down? from the left or the right? from the earth or the sky?) reinforces the dreamlike state. When Firdaws’s narration comes to an end, her voice “stopped suddenly as voices in a dream stop.” The psychiatrist moves her body “as someone who moves while asleep.” Though Firdaws’s voice disappears, its echo remains “like those voices which we hear in dreams.” Once again, where these voices come from seems obscure. Firdaws’s narration comes to a close with the identical phrases that opened it, all of which are imbued with the world of dreams.^[24]

The narrative encounter between the psychiatrist and the prostitute may partake of the unreal, but Firdaws, inside her own story, is “real, of flesh and blood,” as the external voice assures us in both the opening and the closing of the frame.^[25] Indeed, the tension between dream and reality lies at the heart of the frame of Woman at Point Zero. Has the reader simply been witness to a dream? What is the relationship between dream and reality? Reality is associated with “the flesh and blood” of Firdaws, a corporality that defines her as a body. It is her voice that belongs to the ethereal and uncertain realm of dreams. Her body and her voice interact in a narrative game that overturns the reality of the body flanked as it is by the uncertainty of the voice; ultimately, that voice emanating from the world of dreams is responsible for the narrative. The narrative is what is “real” for the reader, and for the psychiatrist listener. The flesh and blood, the elements of Firdaws’s corporality, will be destroyed when the death sentence is carried out. Her voice will be choked off by the hanging.

The dreamlike state may heighten sexual ambiguities, but it is the “real” Firdaws who aggravates them in her own story. In the boarding school, the young woman becomes infatuated with a female teacher, Iqbâl. A chance meeting, a furtive touching of hands, tears on both sides: this event marks Firdaws. One of her fellow students, Wafiyya, even asks her if she is in love with Iqbâl. When Firdaws answers in surprise, “Me?” Wafiyya responds, “Yes, you, and who else?” When Wafiyya points out that Firdaws speaks about Iqbâl every night, Firdaws answers, “Never, O Wafiyya.” Yes, Firdaws agrees, Iqbâl is a wonderful teacher, “but she is a woman. Is it possible for me to love a woman?”^[26] The rhetorical question answers itself.

Later in her career, when the young prostitute attempts to reform herself by working as a secretary in a company, a similar adventure befalls her, but this time with a man, Ibrâhîm. Here again we find the chance meeting, the furtive touching of hands, the tears on both sides. Asked by her friend Fathiyya if she is in love with Ibrâhîm, who is a dedicated revolutionary, Firdaws answers, “Yes. But I am a junior employee. Is it possible for Ibrâhîm to love a poor young woman like me?”^[27]

The two episodes are more than just isolated narrative exposés of Firdaws’s amorous adventures. A complicated literary process turns similarity into identity. The two adventures are similar in uncanny ways. In both, Firdaws is confronted with an emotional attachment, one that she quickly disavows. In both, moreover, this confrontation is the work of a female friend. Finally, the names of the two supposed beloveds begin with the same “I”: Iqbâl, Ibrâhîm.

Yet there is an essential difference between the two relationships: one is a socially sanctioned potential heterosexual coupling, the other is a nonsanctioned, but equally potential, homosexual coupling. Firdaws’s denial of the possible existence of the two relationships is revealing: the first, with Iqbâl, is rejected on grounds of gender; the second, with Ibrâhîm, on those of class. A woman’s love of another woman is just as improbable as a high-level male employee’s love of a lower-level female one.

The way Firdaws phrases the rejections is telling. In the case of Iqbâl, it is Firdaws who does the loving. In the case of Ibrâhîm, it is he who does the loving. In the male-female relationship, Firdaws is the passive party. In the female-female relationship, she is the active party—a position that should not surprise us, since it conforms to the role she has in the novel’s prologue. But despite her protestations, the relationship with Ibrâhîm does develop further than the one with Iqbâl. Firdaws goes so far as to fall in love with him, and he, we assume initially, falls in love with her.

Lesbian attraction may be part of Firdaws’s universe, but it is the heterosexual unit that receives the bulk of the narrator’s attention. What a view of male-female relations, though! From the old Shaykh Mahmûd, through the sexually exploitative Bayyûmî, to the pimp, men are hardly positive figures in her story. Tempting as it might be to agree with Heong-Dug Park’s assessment that all males in the novel are evil, that conclusion is unfortunately not true.^[28] A slight glimmer of light exists with the male prison doctor in the prologue of the novel. He does not believe Firdaws is guilty. He even writes a petition to have her sentence commuted, which she refuses to sign. Nevertheless, even though this man is not a negative character, his power and authority are subverted by female power and female bonding. He is, in fact, proven wrong when Firdaws finally agrees to speak to the psychiatrist. And it is no literary accident that her willingness to do so is announced not by the male doctor but, as we have seen, by the female prison guard.

In a sense, Firdaws may be correct in refusing to sign the petition—a refusal that will lead to her physical destruction. Her previous experiments with potentially liberating situations were all unsuccessful. Was she not a great success in school, and to what end? The conversation she overhears between her uncle and his wife teaches her that her secondary school degree is useless. Bayyûmî knows about her degree, but that does not keep him from exploiting her body and turning it into an object of exploitation for all his friends.^[29] When Firdaws insists to the schoolgirls in the street that she has a secondary school degree, they mock her.^[30] For the policeman who takes her sexually, it is her role as a prostitute that defines her, not her education. (We will meet a similarly corrupt official in Chapter 4.)

Ironically, her status as a successful woman who sells her body is precisely what allows Firdaws to live in luxurious surroundings, in a house where her degree holds pride of place in its expensive frame.^[31] And although this degree opens the door to that other bastion of respectability, the company in which she works as a secretary, that door, too, closes as Firdaws’s love affair with Ibrâhîm comes to naught. The school and the company are merely mirages on Firdaws’s road to destruction. It is here that the two relationships, with Iqbâl and with Ibrâhîm, turn out to be identical in their futility. Firdaws is doomed to endure a vicious circle of sexual slavery.

But what is sexual slavery if not the exploitation of woman’s body? Indeed, one of the most important leitmotifs of Woman at Point Zero is woman’s body. Who owns it? Who controls it? Does Firdaws have a right to it?

Even as simple a bodily function as eating becomes problematic. In Firdaws’s literary universe, eating combines with gender in provocative ways (though as we will see in Chapter 4, food can also serve as an important class marker). For the prostitute hero, as for the narrator of Memoirs of a Woman Doctor, eating becomes associated with power and a male universe.^[32] The young girl watches her father eat—but not before her mother has hidden the food from the children. Firdaws once stretches her hand to the dish, but her father hits it. She does not cry, because she is so hungry; instead, she watches him eat. “My eyes followed his hand from the moment it landed on the dish until it went up and entered his mouth. His mouth was big, like a camel’s mouth.” Then comes a graphic description of the father’s jaws chewing the food and his tongue rotating in his mouth and stretching out to lick loose food from his lips and beard.^[33]

The connection between food and the male is clear: the mother hides food from the children so that the father may consume it. The father’s body parts pick up a life of their own. The young girl watches his hand as it moves up and down, seemingly of its own volition. The cavity that this hand enters, his mouth, is compared to the mouth of a camel, an unflattering image to say the least. Is it any surprise, given this link of food and male power, that Firdaws’s husband, Shaykh Mahmûd, watches her eat?^[34] Or that when she prepares food for Bayyûmî, she provides him with the choicest morsels, keeping for herself, in the case of fish, only the head and tail or, in the case of a rabbit, only the head?^[35] As Carol J. Adams demonstrates in The Sexual Politics of Meat, such behavior is by no means unusual for women.^[36]

Only when Firdaws earns her first ten pounds from a sexual encounter does she become free to eat with no one watching her. She orders a roasted chicken. As the waiter places the dish in front of her and his eyes move away from the food, she realizes that she is eating for the first time in her life from a dish into which no one is staring. Here, Firdaws is much like the first-person narrator of Memoirs of a Woman Doctor, for whom eating unhampered by society’s constraints was also a significant act. Firdaws wonders if it is money that makes this possible. When she takes the cash from her purse to pay for her meal, the waiter’s eyes play the same game as those of her husband, Shaykh Mahmûd, when, during his prayers, he would be praying and his eyes would wander to the table looking for her dish, or as her uncle’s hand, which, while he was reading, would stretch from behind the book in search of her legs:

The waiter was still standing, while the money was still in my hand, looking at its movement out of the corner of one eye, and with the other eye averting his gaze in shame as someone who averts the glance from a forbidden ‘awra.^[37]

With a single word—‘awra—Firdaws redefines the game that men (and society) are playing. As we saw in Chapter 2 with Memoirs of a Woman Doctor, that highly loaded Arabic word ‘awra can be extended beyond its meanings of the genitals or something shameful that must be covered to include the body as a whole. Firdaws now expands the discussion still further. In her universe, ‘awra refers to money, which is made to possess the same shameful properties as a body part that must be covered. Thus, she realizes that she herself had looked away from money as though it were ‘awra.^[38]

“Averting the gaze” is part of the cultural baggage associated with the word ‘awra. To avoid exposing oneself to the shame of an object defined as ‘awra, one must avert one’s gaze and not look at it. “Say to the believers that they cast down their eyes and guard their private parts” is the famous Qur’ânic injunction from the Sûrat al-Nûr, repeated in each grammatical gender to apply equally to men and to women. The literary and cultural echoes of this injunction have survived centuries, in sources ranging from the poetic to the religious.^[39] The perceived power of the glance is of deep concern even today among the more religiously minded thinkers in the Middle East. It is no surprise that one finds the issue discussed in almost every contemporary work devoted to the proper dress and behavior of a Muslim woman.^[40]

From the religious domain of the glance and the private parts to the economic domain of money—that is quite a semantic jump! Yet, by turning money into an object that is ‘awra, Firdaws has effectively tied money to sex. This linkage is logical given the economic circumstances in the narrative. After all, did not Firdaws earn that money by selling her body? One bodily function, sex, thus permits the accomplishment of another, equally important bodily function: eating. This linkage is interesting. Selling one’s body is not a socially sanctioned activity, though in principle eating is. In Firdaws’s universe, however, eating freely was not permitted her; now it is only because she earns money from selling her body that she can purchase food and eat it unhampered by the male glance. It is no accident that the waiter’s act was placed in the same universe as the acts of her uncle and her husband. The husband’s scopic activity is linked to eating, the uncle’s actions are those of male violation. Money liberates her from male oppression in both domains.

This bisociation (the bringing together of two elements not normally associated with each other) of eating and the sexual act is not alien to Firdaws, as we see in an earlier description of her husband’s sexual advances:

At night, he would wrap his arms and legs around me. I would let his sweaty hand violate all of my body, not leaving anything. Like the hand of a hungry man who has not seen food for years, there he would be wiping the dish, licking it, and not leaving anything in it.^[41]

This quasi-obsession with the oral activity of taking nourishment accords with the general orality of the narrative. In fact, the orality in Firdaws’s saga is a double one: there is, on the one hand, the recounting of the story and, on the other, the activity of eating. And both are central. Only after the incident with the waiter does Firdaws, having realized the importance of money, begin on her independent path as a woman of the world. Now she can walk with her head high and look at money without shame.^[42]

Firdaws’s narrative is a verbal, oral attempt to reclaim her body. But society is more powerful, we learn. Ultimately, this female body will be annihilated. Were it not for the persistent psychiatrist, it would not be only the prostitute’s physical body that would disappear, but her narrative as well. “Let me speak and do not interrupt me,” orders the prisoner at the outset, “for I have no time to listen to you.”^[43] Firdaws takes control, and the physician becomes the passive recipient of the discourse.

Telling her story, we discover, is essential to Firdaws’s existence, impermanent though it may be. But not telling the story to just anyone. Confiding in men leads nowhere. After all, did not the young woman reveal her previous life to Ibrâhîm? And that all-too-brief tryst only led Firdaws back to the streets. Female-to-female narration, however, is a different matter. It is salutary, when not positively life-giving.^[44] Firdaws’s escape from Bayyûmî and his circle of exploitative male friends would not have been possible without the help of the sympathetic female neighbor to whom she told her story.^[45] When she meets the madam who will train her in the world’s oldest profession, Firdaws learns that all men are identical, no matter what their name. She tells this newfound friend her story as well. The madam treats her to a bath, combs her hair, dresses her. Firdaws’s body becomes “soft like the body of a child born an instant ago.” When she opens her eyes and sees herself in the mirror, “I realized that I was born anew, with a soft clean body.”^[46] Just as recounting her tale to the madam permits her to shed the old Firdaws, telling her story to the psychiatrist will also bring about a rebirth of sorts, this time in the form of narrative.

Firdaws’s road to sexual slavery begins in much the same way as that of many of her colleagues worldwide. Bayyûmî’s initially solicitous attitude fits Kathleen Barry’s discussion in Female Sexual Slavery of certain means of procurement.^[47] In some of its descriptions, Firdaws’s account of her life with the madam resembles other accounts of lives of prostitution.^[48] It is when she embarks fully in the profession that Firdaws’s path diverges. Her life of sexual slavery is a solitary—and lonely—one. Save for the madam, other prostitutes are absent from the novel. Only once, and casually at that, is another of the madam’s girls mentioned. Yes, there are pimps. Yes, a pimp has a physician friend who helps him out when one of his “girls” gets pregnant. But the prostitutes remain faceless. In this, Firdaws’s story is quite different from other prostitution accounts. In La dérobade by the French prostitute Jeanne Cordelier, to take but one example, female solidarity dominates. This woman begins her narrative journey in jail, surrounded by other prostitutes. All get locked up together; they face the police system together. Affection for one’s coworkers is manifest.^[49] This is in strong contrast to the atmosphere of Woman at Point Zero.

Why this solitude? Why this lone voice? Because having other victims of sexual slavery would only confuse matters. Firdaws’s narrative, presented on its own, permits her plight to become more universal. She is everywoman. When she first introduces herself to the physician, she comes close to expressing this idea. After describing her expensive makeup and visits to the hair salons, she adds:

I did not belong to the upper class except by my makeup, my hair, and my expensive shoes. And I belong to the middle class by my secondary school degree and my suppressed desires. And I belong to the lower class by my being born to a poor, peasant father who did not read or write.^[50]

The superficial aspects of the upper-class Firdaws underscore her inability to escape her class of birth. The secondary school degree, that worthless piece of paper that did not liberate her as she thought it would, stands as a symbol of the middle class, likewise unattainable. Only the profession of prostitute permits Firdaws to have access to the makeup and hair salons that her lower-class origins otherwise denied her.

Try as she might to escape, Firdaws is still fundamentally a member of the lower class. As such, she is the social opposite of her co-hero, the psychiatrist. These two—the middle- or upper-class woman and the lower-class woman—are favored Saadawian heroes. The middle-class character is able to fight her way to independence and have a career should she so choose, as the narrator in Memoirs of a Woman Doctor did. Firdaws, however, by her lower-class origins, resembles the female character in The Death of the Only Man on Earth (Mawt al-Rajul al-Wahîd ‘alâ al-Ard), for whom “liberation” can be had only through murder and whose lot is destruction.^[51]

It is not a literary accident, then, that Firdaws’s awakening comes at the same time in her life that it did for the narrator of Memoirs of a Woman Doctor. At age twenty-five, after the episode with the waiter, Firdaws the prostitute realizes the value of money and begins to refuse customers at will. At age twenty-five, the female physician, with the help of the old peasant patient, realizes that she has spent her years unaware of her womanhood and begins her quest for love.^[52] Both women have an intermediary in this awakening: the waiter for Firdaws, the patient for the physician. The disparity between the two paths—that of prostitution and that of a fulfilling medical career and romantic life—dramatically highlights the dilemmas of the Saadawian heroes.

Part of the literary tension and the success of Woman at Point Zero derives from the textual coexistence of these two types of heroes in a narrative relationship of enframing. This technique is not unusual in the Saadawian fictional corpus, as we saw in Chapter 2. The internal narrative in “The Man with Buttons,” in fact, sheds some light on the prostitute Firdaws’s tale. In that work, the physician narrator tells us that she published a story entitled “My Husband, I Do Not Love You,”^[53] to which a reader replied by letter presenting her own story.^[54]

The owner of this internal epistolary voice, like the internal narrator of Woman at Point Zero, is named Firdaws. The Firdaws of the short story is not a prostitute or a murderer, but she does have certain experiences in common with the Firdaws of the novel. For both women, the marital state provokes scorching criticism of male-female relations in general, and of man’s body in particular. The husband of the epistolary Firdaws, like his counterpart in the novel, and out of the same miserly concern, watches his wife eat.^[55] The short story narrator is obsessed with her husband’s zabîba (lit. raisin), the prayer bump on a Muslim’s forehead that results from the forehead repeatedly touching the ground during the five ritual daily prayers. This black zabîba, which is visible in the dark, constantly hits her own forehead whenever “that thing” occurs.^[56]

This zabîba eloquently links the world of sex with that of religion. The sexual act that consists of the male penetration of the female is paralleled by the bump’s hitting her forehead. Penetration becomes an act involving more than a man’s sexual organ. Thus, rather than being a sign of piety (as it is normally assumed to be in Muslim society), the prayer bump becomes, for the female, a sign of unwanted male aggression.

The novelistic Firdaws, more violent than her literary namesake in the short story, also centers on a facial characteristic: a tumor on her husband’s lower lip. The physical aspects of this tumor are graphically described, as only a physician’s pen can do:

under his lower lip was a big tumor with a hole in its middle that would dry on some days. On other days, like a rotten tap, red drops like blood or yellow or white drops like pus would fall from it.^[57]

On dry days, Firdaws could feel the sore bumping against her during the sexual encounter, a contact that disgusts both her and the reader, as the old man, over sixty years of age, approaches his young wife, less than nineteen. When the sore was not dry, “a stink resembling the stink of a dead dog” would emanate from it and the young woman would move her lips and nose away.^[58] Unlike its literary cousin, the zabîba, the sore is a protrusion from which liquid issues, bringing it closer to the male organ. Both Firdawses overtly connect the male physical oddity to the sexual act, as woman’s body becomes but a tool at the hands of her husband. Both protrusions are felt physically as the male body approaches that of the female.

The husband’s body in Woman at Point Zero is closer to that of an animal. The sore brings the human into the realm of the canine. More is at stake here, however. When Sharîfa, the madam, first encounters Firdaws, she asks, “What did the dog do to you?” The image of the male as dog might under other circumstances be considered as unremarkable as the English “son of a bitch.” Sharîfa then extends the analogy by encompassing the entire male gender under it: “Which dog among them? They are all dogs under different names.” When in her litany of names that of Bayyûmî surfaces, Firdaws cuts her off: “Bayyûmî!” Sharîfa laughs: “I know them all.”^[59] Like the rest of his gender, Shaykh Mahmûd had earlier been transformed into a “mad dog.”^[60]

The dripping sore that seems to define the Shaykh unites various corporal elements in Firdaws’s marital universe. The Shaykh moves his hand over her body, an act we already saw linked to eating. And no sooner is the eating activity engaged than the sore reappears, hampering the movement of the old man’s jaws.^[61] Orality, we discover, does not belong to Firdaws alone; it is, rather, an essential part of her existence as a wife.

The Firdaws of the zabîba calls into question the “real” aspect of the nonfictional or documentary Firdaws in Woman at Point Zero. The juxtaposition of the two female characters reinforces the fictionality of both accounts. One Firdaws relates her saga in a jail cell, the other through a letter. Both women create private stories accessible initially only to the physician on the receiving end.

This onomastic identity may bring the two internal narrators close to each other, but it does not eliminate differences between the two external physician narrators. Yes, both induce other women to speak. But in Woman at Point Zero, the physician has a certain fragility that only accentuates Firdaws’s power, allowing her to represent everywoman.

Yet this personal strength that is Firdaws’s attribute when we first meet her had not always been part of her character. A striking aspect of Firdaws’s personality for much of the narrative is precisely the opposite: her passivity. She is a reactive individual whose major actions are taken largely in response to those of other characters. Her dominant response in much of the early phase of her life is to run away. But even that has its limits. No sooner does she escape from the oppressive environment of her marriage to Shaykh Mahmûd than she returns to it. She expresses to Bayyûmî her desire to work only after she observes the young girls in the street. Her decision to seek a secretarial position in a company comes about only when Diyâ’ tells her that she is not respectable.

Oddly enough, perhaps the only truly independent act Firdaws performs is the killing of the pimp, something she does when she perceives his fear. Her killing is a reversal of the male act of penetration. She grabs the knife from the pimp’s hand and plunges it into his throat. Then she takes it out of his throat and plunges it into his chest. Then she takes it out of his chest and plunges it into his stomach, and into “all parts of his body.”^[62] This repeated act of penetration, graphically described with the pulling out and plunging in of the instrument, is nothing short of a reversal of the repeated male acts of aggression that for years metaphorically killed Firdaws. How interesting it then is to have her describe her own body as “dead” when she is the victim of Shaykh Mahmûd’s and Bayyûmî’s sexual advances!63 We now see the psychiatrist’s reaction upon meeting Firdaws for the first time in a new light: “As if I had died in the first moment when my eyes met hers. Two killer eyes, like a knife, piercing, deep, steady.”^[64] The glance, penetration, death: all are brought together in that moment when the fragile physician meets the powerful prostitute.

How ironic that a prostitute should represent everywoman! But are we not repeatedly told by this committed narrator that all women are prostitutes?^[65] Certainly, the woman-prostitute-victim nexus is a central motif in this text. A woman who earns her living by selling her body has simply chosen that path consciously.^[66] Firdaws brings this point home persuasively. She describes her uncle and his wife having sex while she listens intently and participates vicariously. She describes in exactly the same terms and grammatical constructions the pimp having sex with the madam, again while she, Firdaws, listens. There is no difference in the two acts, we learn: sexual relations in a legal marriage are identical to those between a prostitute and her pimp. Even more important, a similar terminology emerges in Firdaws’s descriptions of her sexual experiences with both Bayyûmî and Shaykh Mahmûd. From the specific, one moves to the general: it is no longer Bayyûmî or Shaykh Mahmûd or even the pimp who is in question, but the entire male gender’s relationship with the female one. When Ibrâhîm comes to Firdaws many years after their breakup, she asks him to pay the normal rate, which he, with shaking hands, does. She realizes then that he had never really loved her but had only come to her every night because he did not have to pay.^[67]

As a prostitute, Firdaws can hire servants, lawyers, doctors. A charitable donation even leads to her appearance in a newspaper. Honor and fame are not difficult to obtain: they simply demand money.^[68] And it is this newfound status that permits Firdaws finally to play in the domain of real politics. Yes, as a student she had taken part in political demonstrations and screamed slogans calling for the downfall of the government.^[69] Yes, she had even thought she might someday become a head of state.^[70] Ultimately, however, it is the economic liberation resulting from the sale of her body that permits Firdaws to muse about nationalism and politics. When a certain ruler from an unnamed country desires her, she refuses. A policeman, sent daily to convince her to change her mind, argues that Firdaws’s refusal will create bad relations between the two countries (as she cynically puts it, “nationalism required of me that I go to him”). Her response? “I told the policeman that I knew nothing about nationalism and that the nation had given me nothing but had taken everything from me, even my honor and my dignity.” Indeed, Firdaws habitually declines to go to these rulers. “My body is my property. As for the fatherland, it is their property.” On one occasion, her defiance even earns her a stint in jail.^[71] This aside is a jab at the present situation in Arab capitals like Cairo, where it is well known among the local inhabitants that rich male Arabs from the Gulf often use their wealth to partake of young Egyptian women.

Firdaws argues her own position cogently. She may once have dreamt of being a player in politics, but now her body is the pawn in these games. Ironically, it is one of these “princes” or “rulers” who turns her in as a murderer. He tells her that he can afford her because he is “an Arab prince.” She responds, “I am a princess also.” Looking into his eyes, she sees from his fear that he is indeed a prince or a ruler. She therefore exacts an enormous sum of money from him, to which he agrees. To his repeated question “Do you feel pleasure?” she closes her eyes and answers, “Yes.” Stupidly, he believes her. Eventually, though, she gets angry and answers, “No.” She is still angry as she takes the money from him and proceeds to tear it into pieces. His response? “You are a princess, indeed! Why did I not believe you from the beginning?” In the ensuing discussion Firdaws tells this latest john that she has killed a man. He laughs, refusing to believe her. When she asks him why, he says, “Because you are gentle.” She replies, “And who said that killing does not need gentleness?” To convince this disbelieving male that she can indeed kill, Firdaws slaps him. His cries bring the police, and Firdaws is arrested.^[72] It is the political system that will eventually bring about Firdaws’s demise.

Like the pimp, then, this client becomes the victim of Firdaws’s violence. And just as the killing of the pimp had gender implications, so the hitting of the customer transforms gender roles. After the prostitute raises her hand and slaps him, she asks him if he now believes her capable of killing; and before she raises her hand to slap him a second time, he screams for help, “like women screaming for help.”^[73] From the male who violates the body of the female, repeatedly asking her if she receives pleasure from his violation, this prince has been reduced to the role of victim, to the role of a woman.

This incident involves more than just the prince, however. As Firdaws rips up the money this royal trick has paid her, it is

as though I were tearing my uncle’s piaster, and tearing my husband’s piaster, and tearing my husband, and tearing my father, and tearing Marzûq, tearing Bayyûmî and Diyâ’ and Ibrâhîm, and tearing all the men I have seen, and tearing the remains of the piaster of every man on my finger, and tearing my finger too.^[74]

This tearing of all the men with whom Firdaws has come into contact, culminating in her finger, ties her and them indelibly to the sexual act. This narrating prostitute has already sensitized her listener (and the reader) to the fact that male fingers play a large part in her violation by the male gender, whether by Bayyûmî or by the policeman. Her own finger, which touched the money from the sexual act, must itself be ripped to permit Firdaws finally to liberate herself completely and utterly. It is thus no accident that the prince will be her last customer before she is arrested and condemned to death.

If fear in the eyes of the male is what permitted Firdaws to kill the pimp, it is fear of her that motivates the male police system to condemn her.

They condemned me to death not because I killed…but they condemn me to death because they are afraid of my life, and they know that if I were to live that I would kill them. My life means their death and my death means their life.^[75]

When her royal customer tells Firdaws that she is indeed a princess, she denies it:

He said: “I thought you were a prostitute.” I said: “I am not a prostitute. But my father, and my uncle, and my husband trained me from the beginning to be a prostitute.”^[76]

Patriarchy, represented by the abusive and exploitative figures of male authority, is blamed for Firdaws’s selling of her body. This is hardly surprising. After all, she was subject to repeated abuse by all the males with whom she came in contact. She is only echoing Sharîfa’s position that all men are dogs and answering once again the madam’s question posed during their first encounter: “Who began: your father, your brother, your maternal uncle, your paternal uncle?” At that time, Firdaws had answered: “My paternal uncle.”^[77] Now, her answer is more categorical: the male figures are multiple.

If blame is to be distributed, however, society in its entirety is responsible for Firdaws’s dilemma. Her mother participated in the performance of the clitoridectomy when she was a young girl.^[78] This operation leads in the novel to a nostalgic sense of lost desire, to an absent sense of corporal pleasure.^[79] Firdaws asks Sharîfa about feeling and pleasure. The madam replies with a set of rhetorical questions, all of which center on a single issue: Is not Firdaws feeling pleasure from all the material goods she enjoys? Interestingly enough, the first item Sharîfa isolates is food: “Do you not feel pleasure when you eat roast chicken stuffed with rice?”^[80] Unbeknownst (or perhaps not so unbeknownst!) to Sharîfa, she has put her finger on one of Firdaws’s central concerns as a woman: eating. By moving from the sexual domain of pleasure (the implied area of Firdaws’s concern) to that of eating, Sharîfa reinforces the by-now familiar bisociation between eating and sex. We should not be surprised, then, that the restaurant food that played such an important role in Firdaws’s economic and psychological liberation was roast chicken. American readers (and eaters) think of chicken as a less than prestigious meat. In Egypt, however, the opposite is true: chicken is the meat of choice for the well-to-do. Sharîfa and Firdaws here only echo their society’s gastronomic values.

If female mutilation were not enough of a societal intrusion, the ideas on the impropriety of women mixing with men help keep Firdaws out of a university. Had she continued her education, her future might certainly have followed a different course. She might then have had the psychological luxury of worrying about her femininity, like her literary cousin, the narrator of Memoirs of a Woman Doctor. Instead she is married off to Shaykh Mahmûd in an abusive marital situation that, ultimately, leads to her downfall. It is after all her escape from this enforced and societally sanctioned male-female couple that leads her down the path of prostitution and to her doom.

Society, then, is responsible for making of Firdaws’s life a hell, not the paradise that her name implies. Thus, we learn from names what we learned from the prayer bump, the zabîba: there is a difference between what society perceives and the reality of women’s lives. Even the Arabic language becomes a pawn in this game of appearance and reality. Sharîfa, after stating that her sting is deadly, explains to Firdaws that life (al-hayât) and snakes (al-hayya) are one and the same. “If the snake [al-hayya] knows that you are not a snake like it, it stings you. And if life [al-hayât] knows that you do not sting, it stings you.”^[81] The two words come from the same Arabic root. The deadly snake is made to sit alongside life, the opposite of death.

On the surface, the madam’s name, Sharîfa (Honorable One), like the name Firdaws (Paradise), is antiphrastic. Yet, in the context of the narrative and on a deeper level, the names are not so antiphrastic. Sharîfa indeed is a woman with honor: she listens to Firdaws and helps her escape some of the exploitative relationships she had endured. What would have happened to Firdaws had not Sharîfa appeared in her life? The same can be said for Firdaws. True, she is a prostitute; but she is unafraid of death and other negative forces of life. She is an inspiration, when not a life-giving force, for the physician. Ironically, the court, in releasing Firdaws from prison after she refuses to provide her services to a ruler, calls her an “honorable woman” (sharîfa).

Sharîfa and Firdaws are both true to their names. But herein lies the importance of the portrayal of the female characters in Woman at Point Zero. How tempting it would be to conclude in the universal virtue of the female gender and, conversely, the universal evil of the male gender. But just as the male characters are not categorically negative, so the females are not all positive. True, there is the female psychiatrist, there is the prison guard, there is the female neighbor who cries over Firdaws’s fate and helps her to escape Bayyûmî’s clutches: all these women are presented in a positive light. One negative female does stand out, however, and that is the step-aunt, who is instrumental in forcing Firdaws’s marriage to the Shaykh.

What makes this woman different from the others? Is it that Firdaws does not form an intimate, narrating relationship with her? It is, after all, primarily storytelling that effects the female bonding so prevalent in the novel. Through her words, Firdaws forms relationships with women. The uncle’s wife, however, is locked in a situation of sexual slavery, without being cognizant of it. Tellingly, she is the only female character in the novel whom the adult Firdaws encounters in a marital relationship.

This is not just any marital relationship, however. It is one in which the husband is a respected figure, educated in the Azhar, the internationally esteemed seat of Islamic learning. Yet this same uncle molested Firdaws as a young girl, a fact that gives her attack on the couple another dimension: it targets the convergence of marriage and religion.

After Firdaws, now married, is beaten by her older husband, she leaves him and returns to her uncle.

But my uncle told me that all husbands beat their wives, and my uncle’s wife told me that my uncle beat her. But I said to her that my uncle is a respected shaykh and a man who has a complete knowledge of religion, and it is not possible that he beat his wife. My uncle’s wife said that the man who has a complete knowledge of religion is the man who beats his wife, because he knows that religion makes beating the wife permissible and that the pious wife should not complain about her husband. Her duty is complete obedience.^[82]

The complete religious knowledge of the husband is matched by the complete obedience of the wife. But through her revelations, Firdaws has once again unwittingly (or wittingly?) entered into another contemporary religious debate: on the legality of beating one’s wife. When the uncle’s wife argues that men with a complete knowledge of religion are the wife beaters because religion sanctions their action, she is alluding to part of a Qur’ânic verse from Sûrat al-Nisâ’: “And those [women] you fear may be rebellious / admonish; banish them to their couches, / and beat them.”^[83] Much ink has been spilled in Islamic debates over this question of wife beating; usually, it is argued that the beating should not be unduly violent and is better avoided.^[84] Clearly, in both marriages, that of the uncle and his wife and that of Shaykh Mahmûd and Firdaws, wife beating was commonplace.

This abuse of women remains a sore point for the hero of Woman at Point Zero. When she becomes aware of her intense hatred of men, she realizes that the man she hates most is the one who envisions himself as a hero and tries to save her from her state as a fallen woman. She rejects this heroism, asking why no such man sought to save her when she was an abused wife.^[85]

This is not to say that this work advocates the destruction of the male-female couple and the creation of a female-female one. Nor is it the first Arabic novel with a prostitute as a major character. To take but one example, Firdaws must vie with Hamîda, the young woman who turns to prostitution to satisfy her material desires in Najîb Mahfûz’s Midaq Alley (Zuqâq al-Midaqq).^[86] Nevertheless, differences exist between Firdaws’s saga and the stories of her sister prostitutes in the Arabic and North African literary corpus. As Amy Katz Kaminsky argues in “Women Writing About Prostitutes,” men and women writers differ markedly in their literary portrayals of prostitute subjects.^[87] Firdaws had the good fortune to emerge from a feminist’s pen, a fact that may account for the consistency and universality of the message in her saga.

The narrative style in which repetition dominates, in which events merge one with another, creates a sense of quasi-synchronicity. The identity in Woman at Point Zero between the beginning and the end, the prologue and the epilogue, closes the textual circle. But other circles close as well. When the police came to take Firdaws to her execution, “they surrounded her in the shape of a circle.” This physical circle is symbolic of the circularity of the narrative. Firdaws leaves it as she entered it.

The literary linkage between the external and the internal narrator is the embodiment of their common female condition. Firdaws’s impassioned first-person narrative is nowhere interrupted by the psychiatrist listener. Only once does a break in the narration occur, when Firdaws suddenly begins to address a second person, “you.” Emile Benveniste, in his essay “La nature des pronoms,” has already shown us that the two pronouns “I” and “you” are mutually determinative.^[88] What is surprising here is the unexpected ungrammaticality (to use Riffaterre’s term) in the text, the sudden shift with the conscious appearance of the “you” in Firdaws’s narration.^[89] Who is this “you”? Is it the reader? Or is it the psychiatrist listener? Let us ourselves listen to Firdaws:

All women are deceived. Men oblige deceit upon you and then they punish you because you are deceived. Men oblige you to fall into ruin and then they punish you because you have fallen into ruin. Men impose marriage upon you and then they punish you with beating and abuse and continuous servitude. Except that the least deceived women are the prostitutes. And for the sake of marriage or love, woman receives a greater punishment.^[90]

The individual addressed is clearly a woman. The male gender has been turned into a collective category whose punitive actions are imposed on the single female individual who is the “you” There is a haunting quality to Firdaws’s language, in which the acts of men imposed on women and the resulting punishments are repeated. Does it matter who the woman is? Firdaws’s point is clear: the lot of all women is essentially the same. The psychiatrist’s silence is striking: she has been assimilated to the generalized group that is woman.

This common victimization unites womankind. We should not be surprised, then, to discover that the physician and the prostitute respond almost verbatim to the identical provocation. When the male physician tells the psychiatrist in the prologue that he does not feel that Firdaws is a murderer because “you cannot imagine that this gentle woman could kill,” the psychiatrist responds: “And who said that the operation of killing does not need gentleness?” When Firdaws’s royal trick finds it difficult to believe that she could kill because, as he tells her, “you are gentle,” she retorts: “And who said that killing does not need gentleness?”^[91]

The two women, though textually not yet acquainted with each other, reply in the same way to two male speakers. And this identical answer addresses the one aggressive act that the prostitute hero performs in the novel. This rejoinder unites them even before the narrative, with its homosexual subtext, is set in motion. When another of Firdaws’s customers makes a comparison between prostitute and physician, he has hit pay dirt.^[92] Physician and patient alike are caught in the coils of sexual politics.

The psychiatrist and the prostitute are a powerful couple, divided by class but united by gender. In The Circling Song, Nawal El Saadawi reverses the proposition. There, as we will see in the next chapter, the problematic pair of brother and sister is united by class but divided by gender.

Notes

EI² refers to the Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2d ed. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1960–).