From Firdaus to Cameroon: Patriarchal Abandonment, Gendered Violence, and Women’s Survival in Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero

Abstract

Abstract This article offers a postcolonial feminist reading of Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero, examining the interconnected experiences of patriarchal abandonment, gendered violence, economic vulnerability, cultural expectation, and women’s survival. Although existing scholarship has examined the novel through patriarchy, sexual violence, prostitution, trauma, and female resistance, this study brings these concerns into a sustained examination of what it terms patriarchal abandonment: a condition in which women remain bound by familial, marital, cultural, and gendered expectations while the structures that should provide protection, material support, and social responsibility fail them. The reading draws on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s concerns with representation and the subaltern, Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s critique of the homogenisation of Third World women, and African feminist thought, particularly Obioma Nnaemeka’s emphasis on negotiation and context. These perspectives make it possible to read Firdaus neither as a universal figure of female victimhood nor as a simple emblem of liberation, but as a woman negotiating historically and culturally specific forms of power, violence, dependence, and survival. The article examines the novel’s representations of family responsibility, marriage, male violence, economic dependence, social respectability, and women’s obligation to endure hardship, and places these concerns in critical dialogue with contemporary Cameroon. The comparison does not collapse the Egyptian and Cameroonian contexts into one experience; rather, it considers how the novel provides a literary framework for thinking about femicide, gendered maltreatment, economic hardship, male non-provision, family and community responsibility, and women’s survival in Cameroon. The article argues that Woman at Point Zero reveals a contradiction at the heart of gendered social relations: women can be required to sustain family, marriage, morality, and social respectability while being denied the protection, provision, and justice that such responsibilities presuppose. Firdaus’s survival therefore cannot be reduced to a straightforward movement from oppression to liberation; it emerges from her continuous negotiation with structures that constrain her, abandon her, and ultimately compel her to create her own means of survival. Keywords: Patriarchal Abandonment; Gendered Violence; Women’s Survival; Postcolonial Feminism; African Feminism.