Nawal El Saadawi

'An unforgettable, unmissable book for the new global feminist.' The Times 'All the men I did get to know filled me with but one desire: to lift my hand and bring it smashing down on his face.' So begins Firdaus's remarkable story of rebellion against a society founded on lies, hypocrisy, brutality and oppression. Born to a peasant family in the Egyptian countryside, Firdaus struggles through childhood, seeking compassion and knowledge in a world which gives her little of either. As she grows up and escapes the fetters of her childhood, each new relationship teaches her a bitter but liberating truth – that the only free people are those who want nothing, fear nothing and hope for nothing. This classic novel has been an inspiration to countless people across the world. Saadawi's searing indictment of society's brutal treatment of women continues to resonate today.

Woman at Point Zero

Macy HB

He was extremely polite, but treated her with a peculiar kind of courtesy devoid of true repeat which men preserve for women.

All I know is that anything I would have to face in the world had become less frightening than the vision of those two eyes.

If life knows you have no sting, it will devour you.

It was as though I held the whole world captive in my hands. It seemed to grow bigger, to expand, and the sun shone brighter than ever before.

Before I went out through the gate, I looked around me once more. My eyes swept the windows, the doors, and the walls, searching for something to open suddenly and reveal his eyes for a moment, or his hand waving the usual farewell. 

I learned to resist by being passive, to keep myself whole by offering nothing, to live by withdrawing to a world of my own.

Now I realized that the least deluded of all women was the prostitute. That marriage was the system built on the most cruel suffering for women.

Revolution for them is like sex for us. Something to be abused. Something to be sold.

I became aware of the fact that I hated men, but for long years had hidden this secret carefully. The men I hated most of all were those who tried to give me advice, or told me that they wanted to rescue me from the life I was leading. I used to hate them more than the others because they thought they could help me change my life.

I felt the familiar weight pressing down on my breast, but my body withdrew, turned in on itself away from me, like some passive, lifeless thing, refusing to surrender, undefeated. It’s passivity was a form of resistance, a strange ability not to feel either pleasure or pain, not to let a single hair on my head, or on my body, be moved.

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