| BOOK RESPONSE—Woman at Point Zero |
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| Written by Ingrid Fernandez-Casey | |||||
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Discuss this article on the forums. (0 posts) BOOK RESPONSE—Woman at Point Zero Woman at Point Zero is perhaps one of the most compelling stories I have read about the systematic oppression of women in a country dominated by male power structures. The story of Firdaeus’s fate as a female begins with her birth in a rural village. We learn she is one of many children, who are continuously being born and dying of illness, due to the lack of sanitation and poverty in the village. She compares her siblings to chicks who “multiply in spring, shiver in winter and lose their feathers, and then in summer are stricken with diarrhoea, waste away quickly and one by one creep into a corner and die.” (18) The omnipotence of the male as the head of the family and supreme ruler is established from the beginning. Her father never goes to bed without supper, even in circumstances of great scarcity. Although the children might go without food for days on end, her mother would hide her father’s dinner to prevent the children from getting at it. Much like a cold stone idol than a human being, the family, to the extent of the very life of the wife and the children, is sacrificed for the well-being and appeasing of the father. Firdaues father is indistinguishable from the mass of men who worship Allah, thus her relationship to him is detached and similar to that of a slave to the owner of a large plantation full of servant whom he treats with cruelty and indifference. The double standard governing the genders emerge in Firdaues’s narration. When one of her male siblings died, her father would beat his mother, have his supper and go to bed. However, if the casualty was a female child, the father would calmly eat his dinner, have his legs washed and go to bed. The female child rates even lower than a farm animal, which if dead would no doubt impact the financial state of the household and receive more attention and mourning. The sexuality of the female child is eradicated in Arab society before it evens has a chance to be explored. As a response to her impudent question of how her mother gave birth to her without a father, her mother beats her and submits her to a clirodectomy, which should serve its purpose by diminishing sexual desire in women. The brutality of the procedure also has psychological ramifications and it is not surprising many girls become frigid for life after undergoing it at an early age. This is another attestation of the attempt to control women in Arab society. Not only are they unwelcomed into the world because of their gender, but their sexual organs are stigmatized, therefore lawfully mutilated to prevent the loss of honor and enshrouded in shame as dangerous and filthy parts of the body. Firdaeus trajectory underscores the system’s web of oppression against women. While married to a much older, penny-pinching widower, she endures a crippling vouyerism on the part of her husband, who follows her every move in order to find fault and reprimand her, and is often beaten. In addition, she performs the function of sexual aid and must submit to the advances of her foul smelling husband. Firdaues finally runs away from her husband to fall into a similar relation as mistress to Bayoumi. As soon as Firdaues decides to speak and make the choice of finding a job, Bayoumi relentlessly beats her, locks her in the house and uses her as a form of sexual relief for himself and his friends, reducing her body to a mere object. It is perhaps ironic, Firdaus finds the most freedom and comfort when she goes into the prostitution business for herself. At that point the truth becomes apparent. She realizes the prostitute is the less deluded of women in a system built upon the deception and cruelty towards its female subjects, who are brutalized into a permanent state of passiveness and fear. The lesson is that in this limited social ladder available to females, the wife stands at the bottom as she is abused, exploited without paid and subject to complete obedience to the husband. The working woman does not fare much higher. She is scorned by the higher male executives, bribed into providing sexual favors in exchange for a miserly raise and in constant dread of losing her job, as she fears this will cause her to sacrifice her virtue and become a prostitute. Although not considered an honorable woman, a high-end prostitute running her own operation enjoys the greatest freedom as she can choose what she wants to eat and do, afford to live comfortably and possess items of luxury, choose who she wants to do business with and most importantly, not have to submit to the demands and abuse of any man. Consequently, the social constructs of virtue and honor imposed on women act as yet another controlling mechanism to keep them in a state of oppression and undoubtedly do not pay either financially or in social advancement as the wife and the working woman are destined accept misfortune as the epitomizing accomplishment of their life.
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| Last Updated ( Friday, 19 May 2006 ) |
