I finished Women at Zero Point yesterday. It took me very little time as the book is conversational, almost deceptively so. But by the middle of it, my cortisol was too high. At the end, I didn’t know what to do with what I was carrying. I was almost blank, felt heavy. I did want to isolate and then I was calling my inner circle to feel better actually.
Firdaus’s life moves from one man to the next and each one taking something. And I kept waiting. I know for one of them to just not. Her uncle, briefly, came close. That was it. The rest? A procession of harm dressed in different characters.
I was surprised by how much that surprised me.
The first time I read a story about a sex worker was Eleven Minutes by Paulo Coelho during the COVID era. More pages, more pain spread across them. Maria goes through it all. The loneliness, the transaction, and the self harm. And then at the end, a man comes. He understands her. He chooses her. He brings her flowers at the end.
I felt relieved. Happy, even.
I’ve been thinking about that relief since yesterday. What exactly was I relieved about? That she suffered and then was chosen? That the flowers made the suffering mean something? A man’s arrival was the resolution the story needed? Is it all at the end (Apo avolodhan la) ?
I don’t know how much of that relief was mine and how much was years of conditioning telling me that being chosen is the ending worth wanting or suffering. That love, specifically from a man, is what converts pain into something bearable. Maybe, that’s why I didn’t question why before.
Firdaus was never chosen. Not in the way that offers relief. And the book doesn’t pretend otherwise. Too brutal you know. There are no flowers. There is no arrival. Only death at the end.
She sees clearly. By the end, she has stripped every illusion away about men, about society, about what freedom actually costs and even about women who sell and who doesn’t.
You are not saved by anyone. At the end you save yourself or you die. That is the truth Firdaus is carrying and conveyed at the end. Quite cynical. But as you sit with it slowly, you will realize she has more courage than most of us will ever need to have.
There are more Firdauses who are alive and died before. Women whose stories are not going to resolve into relief and obviously, pain is not going to be converted into meaning by someone showing up.
Maybe we don’t need more stories of Firdaus to show us the pain. The pain is not the revelation. Maybe what we need is more Saadawis. People who are willing to sit across from an impossible truth and not look away. To witness it, and then make sure it doesn’t stay buried.
I finished the book yet Firdaus lives rent free.
Cheers!
PS: No hatred towards XY!
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