Money represents control, as it allows a person to have agency over their circumstances, their body, and their life. However, Firdaus ultimately comes to realize that money represents men’s control over women, as it allows them to buy access to women’s bodies and to keep women more easily controlled and socially dependent on them. Firdaus never has access to money—nor is she even allowed to be around it—for the first two decades of her life, since the people who want to control Firdaus understand that with money would facilitate her independence. The first time that a man pays Firdaus for sex and she holds money in her hand, she realizes that she can go anywhere, eat anything, and make her own choices in life—money allows her more control and agency than she’s ever had before. However, after Firdaus kills Marzouk, lets go of fear, and decides that she will act against men when they oppress her, the Arab prince still buys her by paying a massive amount of money. While they are having sex, Firdaus realizes that money ultimately belongs to men in a male-dominated world, and they use it to buy women’s bodies. Firdaus takes the 3,000 pounds that the prince pays her and tears it to pieces in front of him, feeling as though she is tearing apart every single man she has ever known in her life, each of whom used money to control her.
Money Quotes in Woman at Point Zero
I realized this was the first time in my life I was eating without being watched by two eyes gazing into my plate to see how much food I took. Ever since I was born those two eyes had always been there, wide open, staring, unflinching, following every morsel of food on my plate.
How many were the years of my life that went by before my body, and my self really became mine, to do with them as I wished? How many were the years I lost before I tore my body and my self away from the people who held me in their grasp from the very first day?
I was prepared to do anything to put a stop to the insults that my ears had grown used to hearing, to keep the brazen eyes from running all over my body.
One day, when I donated some money to a charitable association, the newspapers published pictures of me and sang my praises as the model of a citizen with a sense of civic responsibility. And from then on, whenever I needed a dose of honor and fame, I had only to draw some money from the bank.
“I am not a prostitute. But right from my early days my father, my uncle, my husband, all of them, taught me to grow up as a prostitute.”
Money Symbol Timeline in Woman at Point Zero
