Literary work: woman in zero point
Introduction
Abuse towards women has been portrayed in literature as a claim to women’s rights. Reading “woman in point zero" it can be seen that it is a portrait of the oppression that women have suffered throughout history and that unfortunately today it continues to happen in the world. Nawal El Saadawi says that tradition is represented through women to maintain identity, although times have evolved economically and socially, so it generates conflicts on how to incorporate modernism into Egyptian society. While Egypt wants economic power and adapts to the economic laws of the West. The woman is still oppressed by social and religious traditions that restrict and criminalize her body and her freedom.
Developing
The continuous abuses and vexations that the protagonist receives, Firaus, during her childhood, and her subsequent youth are those that flow into her sad end: to be sentenced to death for killing someone. These abuses become their way of life throughout their short existence, due to the poor, miserable and macho environment in which Egyptian society develops at that time. When Firdaus manages to leave his town and move to the city, he believes that thanks to his studies he can have a better life, working and supporting himself. But he realizes that although all people are different and have other ways of life, in the end they belong to the same patriarchal society. He also realizes that all that is because society in general lives influenced by the partisan interpretation of religion.
One that according to them dictates that men have power and authority over women, who are treated as inferior and objects available to men. Firdaus is a woman who identifies the injustices she suffers, and tries to rebel against the tyranny of men;the one she suffers in her own meats both in physical and psychological and sexual violence. With each and every one of the men who go through their life. She is gradually discovering that she cannot fight against all that, and that is when she decides to take advantage of the society in which she lives. He owns his own life and chooses to be the only thing that allows him to live in conditions: prostitute;But not any one, because she using her intelligence and her physique is established as a luxury.
Fira’s childhood develops in a difficult environment, marked by his father’s ill -treatment to his mother, with no more justification than his violent character, his traditional mentality, and especially religion, which is always interpreted for the benefit for men. Since childhood he sees clear examples in his father and in his uncle that women for men mean anything other than their instruments of sexual servitude and satisfaction. That is embodied in his mother, to which his father continuously pregnantly, and who is dying the children who are having due to their bad living conditions. In the same way you can see in his uncle, that every time he went to his house he sexually abused her: “I did the same thing that Muhammadain had done to me before. Even more.
Actually, but I no longer experienced the intense feeling of pleasure that radiated from an unknown and at the same time familiar place of my body.”Women have so internalized situations of inferiority and abuse imposed for years by men who do not even try to help or protect their own daughters, since they do what in their childhood they did to them: genital mutilation. It is practiced with the purpose of literally removing any type of sexual pleasure in women, turning sex into an act with only reproductive purposes, another macho tradition installed in the Egyptian culture that Firdaus suffers. "That’s why one day I asked my mother about him. Then he came to a woman who had a navajita or perhaps a razor leaf. They cut a piece of meat from the crotch."
From the birth of a person a clear difference between having a male or female child is established, since men will be the workforce that enters money and food in the house, or will help men in the field. On the other hand, women will not serve anything other than to be housewives, and raised by the men who live in it;Until they become older and they will be a mouth more than feed and considered a burden. “When one of his daughters died, my father took dinner, my mother washed his legs and then went to sleep like every night. When the creature who died was a child, I beat my mother, then drew and go to sleep."When girls are born the only means by which their families can obtain income is to sell them to marry other men in exchange for a dowry.
In this way they go from the father’s yoke to the husband, who will do what he wants because he will belong to him. That is what happens to Firaus, who marry her with a man much older than her. “How to exchange his virgin daughter for a dowry before it was too late knew how to lean on the hand of the foreman and pretend that he kissed her, and how to hit his wife and force her to bite the dust every night."In spite of everything they suffer, women like their mother or aunt do not face men like Fídaus does. They allow abuses, since they see it normal because it is the only thing they have lived with. That is due to the entrenched macho influence from generation to generation through culture and religion in Egypt, they are aware that they cannot win against the power of men, and they simply resign themselves to their fate.
Being continuously denigrated and vexed, they may think they deserve it, which is their destiny dictated by Allah. "Once he hit me everywhere with the shoe. He left my face and body full of cardinals. After that beating, hui from the house and I went to my uncle. But he told me that all husbands hit their women and his wife added that her husband also hit her often. I replicated that my uncle was a respected sheikh, well versed in religious teachings, and that it was impossible, therefore, that he had the habit of hitting his wife. She replied that precisely the men who knew the religious doctrine well used to hit their wives. The precepts of religion authorized that punishment. A virtuous woman should not complain about her husband. His duty was to show him perfect obedience."
Firaus’s pain is not only as a woman, but a state of the female sex under the pressure of the patriarchal regime. The relationship between the historical ascent of capitalism and the female body is illustrated in literature through the figure of prostitution. Just as the pure woman remains socially submissive although there have been social and economic changes, the prostitute woman represents the false glory of industrial modernization. Fídaus is not a murderer by nature, not even the evil of men who pass through their lives make it. In spite of everything he suffers and lives, he is an full woman, with clear ideas and thoughts. He does not want to continue being subject to the mandate of men. Trampled and enslaved by men. Wants to be a free and independent woman.
conclusion
He becomes murderer to free himself from men, because he is the only means at his disposal to overcome them. Firdaus discovers throughout his life that he cannot escape the patriarchal system and that there will always be someone who tries to control and possess. The novel ends with Fídaus becoming the "rebellion" when he decides to choose death rather than living asking for forgiveness for having defended his own life;She does not want to participate in a system that has taken her humanity and degraded from her as a person. Firdaus dies with a last apex of rebellion, kills a man for the first and last time (one of many macho and unscrupulous men towards women) who embodies all the men of the society in which he lives;And he makes it very clear that he is not going to bend more, without fear and with his head very high.
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