One night, her teacher Miss Iqbal gives her comfort, and as Firdaus holds her hand she feels a muted stir of sexual pleasure, though she does not understand what this feeling means. Firdaus thrives here as well, though her painful childhood troubles her. However, after Firdaus marries an upper-class wife he becomes cool and distant, and abandons Firdaus to a secondary boarding school. She enjoys her life with him and excels as a student. When Firdaus’s parents die, her uncle takes her with him to Cairo and enrolls her in school. Firdaus’s uncle routinely sexually abuses her, but she still likes being with him because he teaches her to read and write. Firdaus has little memory of her mother, though she knows that her mother had her circumcised when she was still too young to understand what it meant-though not before her first sexual experience with a young boy named Mohammadain. Her father is terribly abusive and deceitful, though every week at the mosque he pretends to be religiously devout. Firdaus narrates her life story.įirdaus spends her early childhood in a rural village. Egyptian psychiatrist Nawal El Saadawi visits a woman named Firdaus in Qanatir Prison, where she is about to be executed for murder.
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