~ A Woman is no Man, by Etaf Rum ~
The title sounded promising, and so did the blurb of the storyline – about how Palestinians who had lost their homes or been driven out, and migrated to New York, live, as migrants. The novel is told by several women, Isra, the chief protagonist, whom we first meet as a 17 year old in Palestine, who had to ‘sit’ with suitors, coming with their parents to check her out and perhaps propose marriage.
Isra is married to Adam, an American Palestinian living in Brooklyn with his parents and 2 younger brothers. She travels with him to her new home, but there is surprisingly little change in her life, which had previously mainly consisted of cooking and cleaning and taking orders from her parents. Now Isra takes orders from her husband and mother-in-law, Fareeda. She is almost never allowed to step outside, she has no friends, and her life consists of cooking and cleaning again, and bearing babies; waiting for a son. Unfortunately for Isra, she has 4 daughters in succession, each a ‘balwa’ – burden. Isra is not permitted to breastfeed her babies so that she can get pregnant again as quickly as possible, to try for a son.
The novel presents the grimmest picture it can for life for Palestinian American women. While it does nod at the fact there are families less strict with their girls, this household we are told of observes Arab – not Muslim – traditions and keeps their girls subservient and submissive. All the wives seem routinely beaten by their husbands – Isra’s parents, parents-in-law, her own husband – and she comes to accept this is normal, and herself as worthless, because she is a woman. This persists through the generations – Isra’s eldest daughter, Deya, is also a protagonist and given a speaking voice in her own chapters – who is being brought up by her grandmother, Fareeda, and subjected to as strict a regime as her mother’s:
She had not yet understood what it meant to become a woman. She hadn’t realized it meant marrying a man she barely knew, not that marriage was the beginning and end of her life’s purpose. It was only as she grew older that Deya had truly understood her place in her community, She had learned that there was a certain way she had to live, certain rules she had to follow, and that, as a woman, she would never have a legitimate claim over her own life.
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This book should have been such an interesting one, given its subject matter, but alas, it is poorly paced, extremely repetitive, goes on and on about how women are subjugated – using nearly the same sentence constructions over and over again – and thus becomes tedious, dragging, going in circles. It is also a bit too absolutist, too over-simplified. There is constant hinting at some dark, terrible secret in the family, and it is spun out to such an extent that the reader loses patience and by the time the secret is given its big reveal near the end of the novel, has ceased to really care or feel suspense or even surprise. The book is not without its merits – the details of domestic life, the food eaten, the norms and rituals of this community, are all quite charming to come across. However, it is all still dragged down by the author attempting to ram down the reader’s throat – insistently, repeatedly, and heavy-handedly – just how much women are captives/slaves in this culture, and while this message no doubt contains much truth, it is delivered with such lack of skill and nuance as to lose even the sympathetic and feminist reader’s patience.
This novel is problematic in so many ways. Men are presented two-dimensionally as may be expected in such a one-sided narrative, but curiously, women are curiously also two dimensional, and even the ones who are presented as courageous (Sarah, Isra’s sister in law, for example, and Deya) are curiously puppet-like and cliched. There are so many inconsistencies – Khaled as a grandfather is portrayed sometimes as a tyrant, and in other chapters, suddenly not only allows insolence and backtalking, but is apologetic…it doesn’t quite hang together. Fareeda is presented so unflatteringly and as so callous and unloving, that she is given her own chapter late in the novel, perhaps to redeem her by showing the reader her background, story, and sufferings, which may help explain her seemingly hard-heartedness – but by that stage, the reader likely has ceased to really care. Fareeda is just a straw man, like most of the characters in this novel, set up to be knocked down.
This story is clearly one which is important to tell, about the plight of diasporic Palestinian-American women suppressed in their rigid gender roles, but it needs to be told much more thoughtfully, less stereotypically, and a lot less repetitively. (A good editor would be a godsend, editing the structure out and cutting down perhaps half of the tedium of repeats.) All that said, this author shows promise, there are hints of good observation and ability to distinguish subtle societal variations, and after all, this is a debut novel and much has to be forgiven. The author conveys her passion and indignation, but needs to balance this with a lighter, surer touch; there are many ways to win over and convince a readership – the sledgehammer is not always the best tool.
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