Fear and Survival Theme Analysis

After decades of sexism and abuse, Firdaus, an Egyptian woman in the 1970s, sees the whole world as a conflict between men and women, “masters” and “slaves,” governed by fear. As a child and then as a wife, professional woman, and prostitute, Firdaus lives in constant fear of men and what they can do to her, which keeps her in a subservient position. However, when Firdaus kills a man who exploits her, she feels her fear diminish and finds that she has the power to act and fight, to call men what they are: criminals. Firdaus’s transformation from subservient, fearful victim to fearsome woman suggests that men use fear to hold women down and stop them from speaking the truth about women’s oppression in society.

Because of her constant oppression and abuse, Firdaus’s life is full of fear, suggesting that fear plagues all women who live in oppressive, male-dominated societies. When Firdaus learns she will be married to Sheikh Mahmoud, she briefly tries to run away to avoid the horror of an arranged marriage. However, as night falls and she wanders the streets alone, she feels a pair of eyes watching her from the darkness, wandering over her body. The feeling terrifies Firdaus so severely that she runs back to her uncle’s house and submits to the awful and abusive marriage, demonstrating that general fear of the wide world causes her to accept her more specific fear of oppressive situations. Both Sheik Mahmoud and the pimp Bayoumi use violence to control Firdaus, beating her until she submits to letting them rape her. Similarly, a policeman coerces Firdaus into having sex with him by threatening to throw her in jail. In all three instances, men use fear and threats to make Firdaus compliant with their abuse. Fear becomes such a constant presence in Firdaus’s life that even when men don’t immediately threaten violence, she often lets them have their way with her—when a man picks her up on a cold night and initiates sex with her, she makes no attempts to resist or reciprocate, but rather passively accepts the encounter. This suggests that Firdaus’s fear conditions her behavior and makes her docile toward men’s advances and abuses.

Firdaus learns to endure her fear and survive abuse and assault by disassociating her mind from what happens to her body, suggesting that fear encourages women to withdraw from themselves, rather than be active participants in their own lives.  Whenever Firdaus’s husband or Bayoumi rapes her, she does not fight back, but endures the assaults by becoming “like a piece of dead wood,” “emptied of all desire, or pleasure, or even pain, feeling nothing.” Because men regularly inflict violence or sexual assault on her body, Firdaus learns to mentally detach herself from it, demonstrating how one can mentally disassociate to survive pain and abuse as it happens. Disassociation also helps Firdaus deal with her fear. After she runs away from yet another exploitative situation, she observes, “I was no longer afraid. Nothing in the streets was capable of scaring me any longer […] Had my body changed? […] And where had my own, my real body, gone?” Although it protects her from fear, Firdaus’s disassociation also stops her from acting in the real world. She reflects, “I learnt to resist by being passive, to keep myself whole by offering nothing, to live by withdrawing into a world of my own.” Firdaus’s withdrawal protects her mind, but it also allows the men who hurt and abuse her to continue doing so unchecked. This implies that by withdrawing into herself, Firdaus loses her ability to respond to men’s advances or fight back.

When Firdaus kills an abuser—and thus acts against her fear—she realizes that she is an active person, able to fight and to speak the truth about the oppression of women. This transformation makes her a powerful threat to all men, suggesting that women who are not held down by their fears have the capability to fight back against oppressive men. Late in her life, Firdaus loses her independence when yet another pimp named Marzouk takes control of her. When Firdaus challenges him and tries to leave, she sees fear in his eyes: “I saw from the expression in his eyes that he feared me as only a master can fear his slave, as only a man can fear a woman.” Emboldened, when Marzouk strikes her, rather than disassociate, Firdaus actively strikes him back. Marzouk tries to pull his knife, but Firdaus takes it from him and stabs him to death. She acts, rather than withdraws. Firdaus is surprised at how easy it is to kill an abuser, and that she did not do it sooner. She reflects, “I realized that I had been afraid, and that fear had been with me all the time, until the fleeting moment when I read fear in his eyes.” When she kills Marzouk, Firdaus recognizes her own ability to retaliate against men. After the police arrest Firdaus for murder, she boldly tells them she simply killed a criminal: “I am saying that you are all criminals, all of you: the fathers, the uncles, the husbands, the pimps,” suggesting that all men are culpable for oppressing women. To the police, Firdaus’s boldness makes her a “savage and dangerous woman,” to which she responds, “the truth is savage and dangerous.” The police arrest Firdaus and sentence her to death “not because [she] had killed a man […] but because they are afraid to let [her] live.” Firdaus remarks, “I am speaking the truth now without any difficulty,” suggesting that now that she recognizes her own ability to act, she is free to criticize their sexist society as she sees it, making her a threat to all men in power, who maintain their power by keeping women fearful and repressed.

Firdaus’s transformation suggests that when women recognize their ability to act in spite of fear, they can tell the dangerous truth about male domination and call out their abusers. At the same time, Firdaus’s transformation also results in her own death, demonstrating that as powerful as it is for women to overcome their fear and resist oppressive societies, there’s also genuine risk involved in doing so.