Country: Egypt
Author: Nawal El Saadawi
Publication Year: 1977 (English language version: 1983)
Genre: Fiction/Creative Non-Fiction
Pharaohs, pyramids and hieroglyphs. These are the images we conjure up in the west when thinking of Egypt. Our image of North Africa’s most well known country is dry baked in images from more than 3,000 years ago.
When we do think of present day Egypt, it is usually through the eyes of western travelers. Michael Palin passing through on his way around the world, or travelling from one polar region to the other. Indiana Jones digging up the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark (the scenes were actually filmed in Tunisia). Or Agatha Christie’s various novels set in Egypt and the Middle East, of which Death on the Nile is surely the most famous.
In arriving in Egypt on the first stop of this literary journey around the world, it is surprising how much I have read set in the country without actually seeing it through Egyptian eyes.
I have read Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandrine Quartet, set in the city from which it takes its name. The four books feature a motley band of expat Europeans in the years leading up to the Second World War. While Egyptian life is heavily represented in the series, it is almost always seen through the eyes of colonisers and administrators rather than from viewpoint of the indigenous population.
Even this year, I have read P Djeli Clark’s, A Master of Djinn, a steampunk novel set in an alternative version of Cairo in which djinn and other fantastical creatures live and work in the city. Also, S A Chakraborty’s Daevabad Trilogy, which partly takes place in Cairo. However, both authors are American by birth and aren’t of Egyptian heritage. As well written as these book undoubtedly are, they hardly represent Egyptian life.
To find something more representative, I turn instead to Nawal El Saadawi’s 1977 novel, Woman At Point Zero. I’m sure there will be objections in choosing this book, both for its length (108 pages in translation) and its subject matter. However, I think it’s the perfect book with which to start and it’s my project, so if you don’t like it you can go lick a Sphinx. I’m joking of course.
Woman At Point Zero claims to be a true story. The account of a woman, Firdaus, who has been sentenced to death and tells her story to El Saadawi in her cell shortly before she is taken away to be hung in the prison courtyard.
That story is depressingly familiar. Good
schooling that can’t result in a decent job for a woman living in a domineering
male society. FGM. Arranged marriage. Abuse and exploitation, leading to a life of
sex work and further abuse. Even when our hero achieves the only kind of
success open to her, her victory is still results in a broken neck at the end of a rope.
The trope of the condemned prisoner telling their story on the eve of their execution is a well worn one in literature. I have no doubt the bulk of Firdaus’s story is based on real events, but when you’ve read and written as much as I have, you can spot the set pieces and embellishments quite easily. Yet no story is ever truly based on reality. Not even autobiography (especially not autobiography).
Woman At Point Zero moves like a freight train through Firdaus’s life and leaves you with dozens of questions at its end. Which is what good books are meant to do. A book is a symbiotic relationship between reader and writer. When the final page is read and the book is closed, it is up to you as the reader to decide what to do with the story. What to read between the lines.
The irony is that Nawal El Saadawi was herself later imprisoned in the same prison for criticising President Sadat in 1981. It wasn’t her last brush with the Egyptian judicial system. Indeed, she was forced into exile in the 1990s after death threats from Islamists and spent a number of years teaching in the United States.
I said there would be objections to picking Woman At Point Zero to represent Egypt in this project and the criticism that is leveled at the book is that it presents a stereotypical view of Islam for western audiences.
This is a talking point I’m sure we will encounter many times during this project, because people always want to portray their own culture as some kind of socialist utopia and will brook no criticism.
Yet there is little in El Saadawi’s book that isn’t universal to all patriarchal societies, whether they be Muslim, Christian, Hindu, or Chinese Communism. Many of the scenes in Woman At Point Zero could be set on the streets of Soho with little difference in tone or male scuzziness. Pimps and punters are the same the world over.
Which is the ultimate testament to Nawal El Saadawi and Woman At Point Zero. That the novel is both local to Egypt and at the same time universal. It is also timeless. It could be set in the Egypt of Lawrence Durrell’s Justine or Mountolive and seem just as contemporary. Or even the 1910s of A Master of Djinn, or the Napoleonic era of the Daevabad Trilogy. It is the triumph of the novel: It is the tragedy of the world.
Nawal El Saadawi remained staunchly political her entire life. She founded the Arab Women's Solidarity Association shortly after her release from prison in 1982. She took part in the protests in Tahrir Square in 2011 during the Arab Spring. She died in 2021, aged 89. Which, as they say, is not a tragedy.
Literature at its best is fractal. It gives us important insights on one place or one point in time. Yet when we zoom out to the world, its focus and its impact remain just as razor sharp. Woman At Point Zero passes this test for great literature. It is exactly the kind of book that set me out on this global path. It’s a great place to start. It is somewhere to which I will no doubt return.
Nawal El Saadawi
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