SOURCE: Payne, Kenneth. “A Woman at Point Zero: Nawal El Saadawi's Feminist Picaresque.” Southern Humanities Review 26, no. 1 (winter 1992): 11-18.

In the following essay, Payne investigates the rogue aspects of Firdaus's actions in A Woman at Point Zero and establishes that her behavior is not merely an act of rebellion but an effect of her dissatisfaction with an oppressive society.

Nawal el Saadawi's A Woman at Point Zero was conceived in the autumn of 1974 at Qanatir Women's Prison, where the author began a series of meetings with a female prisoner who was awaiting execution for having murdered a man. The prisoner was Firdaus, and A Woman at Point Zero is her story—“the whole story of her life,”¹ el Saadawi calls it—told from the cell of the condemned. The novel therefore represents an interesting configuration of narrative source and perspective, being essentially the writer's selective and imaginative rearrangement...