Unveiling Women’s Struggles in Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero from a Postcolonial Perspective

Nawal El Saadawi (1931-2021) was an Egyptian author, public health physician, psychiatrist, and prominent feminist activist. In several of her works, including Woman at Point Zero (1975), she endeavoured to uncover the hidden side of the truth concerning ‘double-colonized’ women in third-world countries. In the novel that is the subject matter of this article, Saadawi remarks on the patriarchy of religious fundamentalism and its adverse impacts on Arab Muslim women contextualised within Egypt’s socio-political environment. The work proves to be the voice of oppressed women who were compelled to live under the circumstances inherent in problematic and traumatic social traditions that deny women's autonomy, such as circumcision through the paradigm of knowledge/power marginalising discourses on political, economic, cultural, and religious matters as the legacy of the post-colonial era. It was through Firdaus, the rebellious heroine of the novel, who stood against her predestined life story fraught with violence that is shaped and imposed by the state administration as an extension of social and traditional practices circumscribed her willingness to effectuate the knowledge of herself, her essence, and her emancipation at the cost of her life. Saadawi illuminated her heroine as a unique and courageous figure in an Arab country. In this article, Firdaus’ struggle for women’s prescribed roles in politics, economics, culture, society, and nationalism in a post-colonial country within the scope of religious fundamentalism will be analysed using Orientalism as the matrix of these problematic norms for the alienation of women.