Woman at Point Zero

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

During her work as a psychiatrist and studying neurosis in Egyptian women in the early 1970s, Nawal El Saadawi had the opportunity to meet women in the Qanatir Prison Hospital after becoming friends with one of the doctors there. Saadawi had just been ejected from her position as Director of Health Education and found herself with the time to spend on an in-depth analysis of the particular mental health conditions experienced by women in Egypt. Saadawi met many women in the prison, all of whom had an impact on her but none so much as one named Firdaus. Firdaus was to be executed for killing a man, but before she died, she took the time to tell Saadawi the story of her life and everything that led to her end. Saadawi remarks on Firdaus’s “features, her carriage, her courage […] [and] her absolute fearlessness of death” (iii). Months later, Saadawi created a fictional account, based on Firdaus’s life, that’s meant to embody the sheer lack of Egyptian women’s “right to live” (iv).