Family Failure and Orchestrated Agonies in El-Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero and Nurudeen’s from a Crooked Rib

Abstract

The family, as one of the key agencies of socialization, has a pivotal role to play in the character formation of any child. The belief system of any family into which someone is born becomes part of the person’s cultural identity. Such system, usually provided by the parents and other persons with whom the youngsters share immediate contact, shapes their ideas about the surrounding world and also gives them certain ideas about themselves. Psychological identification with the groups to which individuals belong (membership groups) or to which they want to belong (reference groups) is another strong force in the personality formation of any child. This paper examines the various ways through which the membership and reference groups (family inclusive) of Firdaus and Ebla combine to offer them the unhealthy cultural/societal disposition, which ultimately result in sheer damage of their personality. From the psychoanalytic approach to literature, this study, therefore, employs the Frustration Aggression theory to examine the causes and consequences of the maladjusted behavior of the protagonists of El Saadawi’s Woman At Point Zero and Nuruddin Farah’s From a Crooked Rib. This theory was originally formulated as Frustration Aggression hypothesis by Dollard, Doob, Miller, Mowrer and Sears in 1939. It states that the occurrence of aggressive behaviour always presupposes the existence of frustration; put the other way, the existence of frustration always leads to some kind of aggression.