Woman at Point Zero

"As I wrote in an essay eulogizing her, Nawal El Saadawi is not an Egyptian version of a white feminist. She is the Nawal El Saadawi of the world, not the Simone de Beauvoir of the Arab world. Nawal El Saadawi was one of the foremost feminists in the world, until her recent death. I included Woman At Point Zero because it is a slim but brutal and unrelenting book. It is brutal because patriarchy is brutal and it’s unrelenting because patriarchy is unrelenting. In the book, Firdaus, a sex worker who is about to be put to death for murdering her pimp, tells the story of how a parade of patriarchal misogynists brutalized her. In each of the books I chose, there is a quote that I like to use. In this novel, the protagonist says her accusers call her “a savage and dangerous woman.” And she says that is because “I am speaking the truth. And the truth is savage and dangerous.” This quote explains why I wrote my book. I want feminism to terrify patriarchy by telling the truth. And the truth is savage and dangerous. Oh, patriarchy is universal. I was born in Egypt. I grew up in the UK and Saudi Arabia. I spent some time in Jerusalem, as a journalist. I moved to the US in 2008. Patriarchy is in all of those places. I say in the book that when you ask people, especially men, about patriarchy, it’s like asking a fish, what is water? The fish doesn’t know what water is because water everywhere. Patriarchy, like oxygen, is everywhere—whether you’re in China, under the Communist Party system or in Saudi Arabia , where there an absolute monarchy, or in UK with a constitutional monarchy, or in the US with a constitutional two-party system. People often like to point to another country or another part of the world and say, ‘that’s patriarchy over there’. But they forget that patriarchy is right where they are too."