Woman at Point Zero - Nawal El Saadawi

I just now came back down from the stacks after grabbing a second book (God Dies by the Nile) from Nawal El Saadawi. 1) kudos for me for remembering the proper call number area, 2) I now have 30 books out from the library in varying degrees of progress (mostly untouched), and 3) I saw a book I instantly disliked with a reactive and intense disdain. I don't remember what the title was exactly (because yet my short term memory continues to worsen) but the premise of Paul Bowles' work seems to be anthropomorphic reinterpretation. An American man involved in the "folkloric" trend, blending all to be informal orientalism through scoping large profits. 

Anthropology is of course always facing this problem at its core. Colonial spies or not, their ultimate aid is to western expansion and can only be seenthrough this lense. People like Zora Neale Hurston primarily get this treatment either ignored or hyper-focused on. As if it needed to. Bowles is clearly "problematique" but I wonder who else could face the critic of its methological framework.

Woman at Point Zero is in one part a true story and in another a complete fabrication. Saadawi was a sociologist who her surrounding narrator is based on, and Firdaus is a person whose story she has tried to notate. At first I felt like Frankenstein, one narrator narrating to another and then passing it down the next line, but there is only one level to enter past that does not exist in the meta-narrative (the transcription of non to fiction). Saadawi's self-insert in the book hardly exists in the book, her drama is getting the story and then dealing with the frameless loss of life/irrehensible non-justice. Woe to the one who keeps living, who realizes the world is not set to be safe.

If I had no idea the context of the book, it would read different. The story would be a lot more...torturous. It feels as if the character of Firdaus gets a further loathsomeness constructed upon her by the book than would be in the world. Not to say that someone cannot hurt this bad, but in its writing, Saadawi denies Firdaus any sensations of brevity. Her attempts to love are squashed, her relationships reveal their ugly head of violent and damming ownership, her life ends without meaning with a whisper of nothing to its being relayed. I think the last sits the most pertinent motion that the book could do - that this doesn't matter. Not in a personal sense, I think most people would have argued to try to save Firdaus - the determined to die without meaning or kill off scum at her will - because she's a fun hero. But she didn't live, and she wouldn't have, and no one other than Saadawi and us could give a single fuck about her now. It doesn't matter. She doesn't matter.

Saadawi is a sociologist and leading figure of feminism for Egypt because of Woman at Point Zero's success. I kinda dig her. I'm glad that a random patron took her work out because I wouldn't have found it. There's a moment in the book that at the very least suggests an intimate and caring relationship between a character and her mother figure and at most conflicting is a queered narrative unfinished and messily fine before the inevitable place where it would become troubling. The book presents a few different ideas beyond the patriarchal violence of existing as a woman that are unexpected too - an abolitionist-leaning perspective, talk on female circumcision that I am unprepared for to my understanding's basis, that the autonumous is a dead art by the status quo imbued in patriarchy. At the same time this piece is one of those anthropological studies of a sort. A sociologist taking a dead woman's story for her own gains/decisions of its meaning. I think that's a line that is apparent but doesn't have to only be seen in its light.