Teaching the Convocation Book

Saadawi, Nawal. Woman at Point Zero. 1975. Trans. Sherif Hetata. London: Zed, 2007. Print.

Quotes

She shook her head and said, ‘I do not know. But I feel that you, in particular, are a person who cannot live without love.’ (25)

 

The important thing is how to live until you die. (57)

 

How many were the years of my life that went by before my body, and my self became really mine, to do with them as I wished? How many were the years of my life that were lost before I tore my body and my self away from the people who held me in their grasp since the very first day? (74)

 

I now knew that all of us were prostitutes who sold themselves at varying prices, and that an expensive prostitute was better than a cheap one. (82)

 

Never had I felt so humiliated as I felt this time. Perhaps as a prostitute I had known so deep a humiliation that nothing really counted. When the street becomes your life, you no longer expect anything, hope for anything. But I expected something from love. With love I began to imagine that I had become a human being. When I was a prostitute I never gave anything for nothing, but always took something in return. But in love I gave my body and my soul, my mind and all the effort I could muster, freely. I never asked for anything, gave everything I had, abandoned myself totally, dropped all my weapons, lowered all my defences, and bared my flesh. But when I was a prostitute I protected myself, fought back at every moment, was never off guard. To protect my deeper, inner self from men, I offered them only an outer shell. I kept my heart and soul, and let my body play its role, its passive inert, unfeeling role. (93)

 

The time had come for me to shed the last grain of virtue, the last drop of sanctity in my blood. Now I was aware of the reality, of the truth. Now I knew what I wanted. Now there was no room for illusions. A successful prostitute was better than a misled saint. All women are victims of deception. Men impose deception on women and punish them for being deceived, force them down to the lowest level and punish them for falling so low, bind them in marriage and then chastise them with menial service for life, or insults, or blows.
Now I realized that the least deluded of all women was the prostitute. That marriage was the system built on the most cruel suffering for women. (94)

 

She no longer hopes for anything or desires anything. (95)

 

Revolution for them is like sex for us. Something to be abused. Something to be sold. (96)

 

And not one of them came to my help when my heart was broken because I had dared to fall in love. A woman’s life is always miserable. A prostitute, however, is a little better off. I was able to convince myself that I had chosen this life of my own free will. The fact that I rejected their noble attempts to save me, my insistence on remaining a prostitute, proved to me this was my choice and that I had some freedom, at least the freedom to live in a situation better than that of other women. (97)

 

Now I had learnt that honour required large sums of money to protect it, but that large sums of money could not be obtained without losing one’s honour. An infernal circle

whirling round and round, dragging me up and down with it. (99)

 

That men for women to sell their bodies at a price, and that the lowest paid body is that of a wife. All women are prostitutes of one kind or another. Because I was intelligent I preferred to be a free prostitute, rather than an enslaved wife. (99)

 

I was nothing but a body machine working day and night so that a number of men belonging to different professions could become immensely rich at my expense. I was no longer even mistress of the house for which I had paid with my efforts and sweat. (103)

 

A woman on her own cannot be a master, let alone a woman who’s a prostitute. (104)

 

‘I am not a prostitute. But right from my early days my father, my uncle, my husband, all of them, taught me to grow up as a prostitute.’ (108)

 

They said, ‘You are a savage and dangerous woman.’
‘I am speaking the truth. And truth is savage and dangerous.’
[. . .] I was the only woman who had torn the mask away, and exposed the face of their ugly reality. They condemned me to death not because I had killed a man—there are thousands of people being killed every day—but because they are afraid to let me live. They know that as long as I am alive they will not be safe, that I shall kill them. My life means their death. My death means their life. They want to live. And life for them means more crime, more plunder, unlimited booty. I have triumphed over both life and death because I no longer desire to live, nor do I any longer fear to die. I want nothing. I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. Therefore I am free. For during life it is our wants, our hopes, our fears that enslave us. The freedom I enjoy fills them with anger. They would like to discover that there is after all something which I desire, or fear, or hope for. Then they know they can enslave me once more.’ (110)

 

I am speaking the truth now without any difficulty. For the truth is always easy and simple. And in its simplicity lies a savage power. I only arrived at the savage, primitive truths of life after years of struggle. For it is only very rarely that people can arrive at the simple, but awesome and powerful truths of life after only a few years. And to have arrived at the truth means that one no longer fears death. For death and truth are similar in that they both require a great courage if one wishes to face them. And truth is like death in that it kills. 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. (112)

 

I never saw here again. But her voice continued to echo in my ears, vibrating in my head, in the cell, in the prison, in the streets, in the whole world, shaking everything, spreading fear wherever it went, the fear of the truth which kills, the power of truth, as savage, and as simple, and as awesome as death, yet as simple and as gentle as the child that has not yet learnt to lie. (114)

Questions

• Reader-Response
  • Reflect upon your initial reaction and emotional response to the book. What did the book make you feel and think about, and more importantly, why? How did your response to the novel change over the course of reading it. Compare and contrast your initial reaction to your final reading of the ending?
  • Describe Firdaus’s (pronounced “fur” as in the hairy coat of an animal and “dos” as in the operating system) by Saadawi on BBC World Book Club) character. How might her identity constitute the theme of the novel? Why do you or why do you not identify with Firdaus? Did her story change you? How do you regard Firdaus’s simple and savage truth?
• Existentialism
  • Who is Firdaus, what is at issue in her life, and what is her view of the world? (19)
  • Given Firdaus’s narrative, how should one live one’s life? (57)
  • What is freedom? Define freedom for Firdaus (74)....and yourself.
  • What is Firdaus’s relationship to the world as a child, as a woman, as a prostitute, as a prisoner?
  • Why does this novel exist? What is the protagonist’s, the author’s, the narrative’s purpose?
• Cultural Studies
  • Describe Egyptian culture—economy, education, culture, etc. What does it value?
  • How does Egyptian culture in 1975 compare with American culture today: what does your community/country value?
• Feminism
  • What is the status of women in 1975 Egypt?
  • How and why is a female nothing and a male something (17), why is Firdaus beaten by her father (21-3), and what is the significance of her father keeping food for himself (18)?
  • What does Firdaus mean by women being victims of deception and delusion (94)?
  • What does Firdaus mean when she says she was raised to be a prostitute (108) and cannot be her own master (104)?
    Do you trust the author, narrator, and Firdaus? Why or why not?
  • According to Saadawi in the Author’s Preface, who is Firdaus and from where does her story come?
    Compare and contrast the lives of women in the novel to the lives of men.
  • If Firdaus were a man, how would she have been raised differently?
  • How would her world view and relation to the world have been different?
  • How does the status of women in 1975 Egypt compare with that of women in 2009 Georgia/America?
• Marxism
  • Describe the psychosocial economics of prostitution (82, 103—“body machine”) and marriage (99) in 1975 Egypt.
  • Compare and contrast Firdaus’s life as a prostitute and her life as an office worker. In which role was she more content? more self-possessed? more alienated?
  • What are the psychosocial economics of love, sex, and marriage in 2009 Georgia/America—for men? for women?
• Psychoanalysis
  • What does Firdaus fear? What does she desire? How do her fears and desires change over the course of her life?
  • Describe Firdaus’s childhood—her relationship with her mother (who sexually mutilates her [12], emotionally abandons her [16], and serves her father [16]), her father (who beats her and keeps food for himself), and her uncle (who rapes her [13])
  • Compare and contrast Firdaus’s desire before her genital mutilation (12) and after (25—“faraway yet familiar pleasure arising from some unknown source, from some indefinable spot outside my being”).
  • How and why might her clictorectomy alienate her from her body and steer her toward prostitution?
  • Describe her sexuality, her relationship with her body (74), her (intimate) relationship with herself, women, men.
  • Thinking about what she says about the humiliation of love and the defense of prostitution (93), compare and contrast her intellectual views on and emotional responses to prostitution, on the one hand, and love, on the other hand.
• Truth vs Ideology
  • Define ideology.
  • What does Firdaus learn about the relationship between truth and power?
  • Why does the narrator mean when she says that Firdaus’s voice echoed “the fear of the truth which kills, the power of truth, as savage, and as simple, and as awesome as death, yet as simple and as gentle as the child that has not yet learnt to lie” (114)?
  • What did you learn about humanity from reading this book?
  • What does Firdaus do—what can she do—with her “savage and dangerous truth”?
  • How might you apply Firdaus’s way of seeing her world to your own world?
  • Have you looked at society, seen a mask, and stripped it away?
  • What savage and simple truths have you experienced?
  • What will you do with your knowledge of the world?

Links

Saadawi, Nawal (Wikipedia)
Woman at Point Zero (Western Michigan U: Colonial and Postcolonial Literary Dialogues)
Woman at Point Zero (Wikipedia)
Woman at Point Zero (BBC World Book Club Podcast)