Female and the outrageous Arab patriarchy: Analysing Nawal El Saadawi’s “Woman at point zero” as a novel of female derision and melancholia

Abstract

All my life I have seen searching for something that would fill me with pride, make me feel superior to everyone else, including kings, princes and rules. (El Saadawi: 1983)

The paper purports to catechize the Egyptian born Nawal EL Saadawi’s “woman at point zero” in the mise-en-scene of the western feminist theories. The objective of this anatomizing and analysis is to corroborate and document a confabulation and outline the benefits of comparative feminist discourse with regard to patriarchal policies in the Middle East. The paper sternly but clearly adduces that El Saadawi strongly altercates the supremacy of a traditionally phallocentric society empowered by religion and masculinity. In “Woman at Point Zero” the author has impetuously reinterpreted disentangled culturally subdued dogmas and credos and deconstructed regressive traditions allied with patriarchal jurisdiction and sovereignty. Reckoning on her experience as a prison psychiatrist, El Saadawi grills a chauvinist culture that callously brutalizes women. She primarily aims to centralize the marginalized and give a voice as well as an agency to the voiceless. The author splendidly delineates the abuses, domestic aggression, rape, sexual frazzle and similar other social vices that the callous man eternalizes against women. To a very brobdingnagian extremity, the novel succeeds in consummating the culture of projecting the Arab women as defunct, moribund and obdurate object, yet the narration goes beyond the known liberal approach to conflict resolution in many similar great works of Afro-Arab writers. The writer industriously reinvestigates the face of feminism in the Arab world in a way that is antithetical to the cherished values of women as compassionate human beings. The author presents a resilient, defiant and evil minded protagonist whose audacious revolt against the excruciating and onerous patriarchal culture leaves every reader bemused.