Woman at Point Zero

Firdaus begins detailing the story of her life by demanding not to be interrupted, for she has little time. Growing up, she feels a strong disdain toward the men she sees in newspapers and spits on them. When she later becomes a sex worker, she’s quickly successful and spends money on expensive makeup, clothes, and salons. She describes her education and “suppression of desires” (12) as middle class, and her birth and upbringing as “lower class” (12). Her family is poor, and her father is a man who steals from his neighbors and beats his wife. He attends weekly prayer at the local mosque, and afterward Firdaus sometimes watches as he and the other men discuss subservience to Allah and to the country. As a young girl, Firdaus often walks past the men, carrying a jar of water on her head, and they all seemed to harbor a hidden aggression she can’t yet place. In watching her father among them, she sometimes loses track of him; they all seem alike to her. When she asks her mother about her father, feeling disconnected from him and suggesting that she understands what sex is, Firdaus’s mother beats her and then punishes her further by having a woman perform genital mutilation.