A Feminist Ethos of Point Zero

Nawal El Saadawi—writer, physician, psychiatrist, controversial feminist activist—has been one of the most famous, indeed infamous, feminists in the world. From her psychiatric practice to her fiction, she created an ethic of protest based on conversation between and among women. She never stopped protesting, taking to the streets in 2011 at the age of seventy-nine to join protesters in Tahrir Square. In her memoirs, but also in her fiction, that life of protest emerges. Some of it is overtly based in biography, some not—such that a novel like Woman at Point Zero presents the familiar frame trope of storytelling between women as a shield against the threat of the murderous arm of the state, as a psychiatrist listening to a prisoner.

The many obituaries written about El Saadawi note her fifty-odd books, her memoir written in prison with eyeliner on toilet paper, her work against female genital mutilation, and the fear and reprisal she engendered in various Egyptian governments. They also note the clarity of her politics and thinking, and the unforgiving nature of that clarity.

El Saadawi, a professor at Duke in the 1990s, returned in the 2000s for a conference organized by miriam cooke and Rashmi Varma on the use of women as a rationale for the war in Afghanistan, at which she presented alongside Gita Sahgal and Meg Segrest. At the time I was working on two projects: one on psychoanalysis and colonialism and another on the figure of woman in the Franco-Algerian imagination. My own sense of what it meant to take a stand for Afghanistan was shaped by the Algerian situation and what it meant, for an outsider and a nonspecialist, to take a stand for a space in the world shaped through colonial history. My reading of many feminists from predominantly Muslim sites was formed through their use of the Scheherazade trope—a woman protecting other women against a murderous leader through storytelling as an invitation to speak by another woman—an address crafted in the second person (in the case of Scheherazade, that was her sister, Dinarzade). Think of Leïla Sebbar's (1982) Shérazade, Assia Djebar's (1987) Ombre sultane, Mariama Bâ's (1987) Une si longue lettre, and Nawal El Saadawi's (1983) Woman at Point Zero. All include the invitation from one woman to another to speak, casting the European convention of the epistolary novel through the Scheherazade frame narrative. Dinarzade, from her supine position, invites her sister, Scheherazade, to tell a story—one that will keep them, and all other women, alive. In addition, my own focus on psychoanalysis and colonialism, an interest that broadens to the sphere of psychosocial studies, places El Saadawi in conversation with other thinkers of decolonization who consider the effects of coloniality wrought on the psyche, like Frantz Fanon or Ashis Nandy.

While both those figures attempted to understand the contingent manner in which both psyche and symptom were formed as individuated and circumstantial, with colonialism initiating murderous effects on entire modern populations, neither put feminism or even women at the center of their overt concerns, even as women were clearly shaping the cases and dynamics they elaborated. El Saadawi provides a correction to that, and does so in a way that takes no prisoners, with colonial and postcolonial, religious and secular, capitalist and socialist positions all coming under scrutiny. The form of women talking or writing to women shapes much of her work. Even when the characters are not women, a feminist ethos of solidarity, survival, and deference toward and desire for the other is in play. There is an attentiveness to the psychopathologies of everyday life that shape the worlds evoked in her writing. But we also witness a style that inscribes the role of listening on the other's terms—a deferential posture of witnessing. Firdaus of Woman at Point Zero refuses numerous times to speak to the psychiatrist, who eventually realizes that

her refusal to see me was not directed against me personally, but against the world and everybody in it. . . . "Firdaus wants to see you!" . . . Suddenly we were face to...