Review by New York Times Review
In A hushed bedroom, a woman smears foundation over the bruises on her daughter-in-law's face, layer after silencing layer. "There are things in this life no one should see," she tells the young woman her son has beaten. "When I was your age, I never let anyone see my shame." Etaf Rum's debut novel is a dauntless exploration of the pathology of silence, an attempt to unsnarl the dark knot of history, culture, fear and trauma that can render conservative Arab-American women so visibly invisible. "Where I come from," her narrator begins, "we keep these stories to ourselves. To tell them to the outside world is unheard-of, dangerous, the ultimate shame. But you have seen us." From a refugee camp near Ramallah to a Brooklyn rowhouse, "A Woman Is No Man" follows three generations of Palestinian women as they confront the claustrophobic expectations that continue to shape their lives. In the spring of 1990, Isra Hadid accepts a marriage proposal that will take her to America, her heart full of fairy-tale hopes. Eighteen years later, her eldest daughter, Deya Ra'ad, longs for college but reluctantly considers potential husbands at the urging of her grandmother Fareeda. When an anonymous note lures Deya to a Manhattan bookshop, the story she knows about her family is violently rewritten. The daughter of Palestinian immigrants, born and raised in Brooklyn, Rum is keenly aware of the risks of exposing her community to the scrutiny of narrative. It's a devil's bargain: Speak and add inadvertent fuel to the ever-smoldering fire of antiArabism - or don't speak and add another layer of silence. "I knew that as long as I stayed away from controversial topics like arranged marriages and domestic abuse, no one would criticize me or call me a traitor. No one would shun me. No one would try to hurt me," Rum has explained. "Perhaps these fears are why there aren't many Arab-American women on bookshelves; why, whenever I search for our stories in bookstores and libraries, I cannot find them." There's a burden that comes with being among the first of your kind; the potential for misinterpretation is too great to leave much to chance. What emerges is a story as didactic as it is brave. "A Woman Is No Man" is both a love letter to storytelling and a careful object lesson in its power. Timorous Isra's heroine is Scheherazade, the bewitching taleteller of "The Thousand and One Nights." "No one asks Scheherazade to marry the king," she marvels. "She volunteers on behalf of all women to save the daughters of Muslims everywhere. For 1,001 nights, Scheherazade's stories were resistance. Her voice was a weapon." Of Rum's three women, it is implacable Fareeda - enforcer of norms, keeper of secrets - whose voice proves the most revelatory. Her marriage at 14 to a stranger in the dust of the al-Am'ari refugee camp has "made a warrior out of her," yet she fights to uphold a system where "the shame of her gender was engraved on her bones." It's a startling portrait of the mechanics of complicity, of the intergenerational pathology of silence. "It took more than one woman to do things differently," Fareeda reflects, wearily. "It took a world of them." Across the globe, a bold new generation of Arab women are putting that defeatism to the test by sharing their stories. The triumph of Rum's novel is that she refuses to measure her women against anything but their own hearts and histories. "It's hard to belong anywhere, truly belong, if we don't belong to ourselves first," Deya is told. Distinctly, defiantly and earnestly, "A Woman Is No Man" belongs to itself. BEEJAY silcox is an Australian writer and critic based in Cairo.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 11, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
"No matter how many books you've read, no one has ever told you a story like this one." The prologue's empathic statement is not accurate. Tara Westover's Educated (2018) and Anouk Markovits' I Am Forbidden (2012) feature women trapped by religion and culture who break free to claim their own lives. First-time novelist Rum's setting, however, is rare: a Brooklyn Palestinian enclave in which reputation matters above all else. In 1990, 17-year-old Isra becomes Adam's wife-by-arrangement, leaving Birzeit, Palestine, for New York. Her mother-in-law, Fareeda, rules the multigenerational home, ensuring that Isra serves and honors. By 2008, Isra and Adam are dead, and Fareeda is pressuring their 18-year-old daughter, Deya, to repeat the cycle of early marriage and motherhood. Determined to escape her mother's fate, Deya discovers an unlikely ally and struggles to save herself and her family. The daughter of Brooklyn Palestinian immigrants, Rum was often told "a woman is no man. Overcoming her fear of community reprisal, she alchemizes that limiting warning into a celebration of "the strength and power of our women."--Terry Hong Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Rum's pleasing debut employs two timelines to recount the story of a Palestinian family living in America. In the early 1990s, Isra is married off and moves to Brooklyn to live with her husband, Adam, and his culturally traditional parents, Fareeda and Khaled. While Isra stays home to cook and clean, Adam spends all of his time running the family's deli, yet the couple is pressured by Fareeda to produce a son. Isra gives birth to four girls, however, fracturing family relations. The second story line jumps forward two decades to follow Deya, the oldest of Isra's daughters, as she faces the prospect of her own arranged marriage. Deya lives with Fareeda and Khaled, as her parents died in a reported car crash when she was young, and as she resists Fareeda's insistence on finding a suitor, preferring to attend college, Adam's long-absent sister, Sarah, reaches out to her niece. The pair meet clandestinely, and Sarah reveals a far darker family history than Deya suspected. Rum's short chapters crisscross timelines with the zippy pace of a thriller, yet repetitive scenes and unwieldy dialogue deflate the narrative. Though the execution is sometimes shaky, there's enough to make it worthwhile for fans of stories about family secrets. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
DEBUT In her propulsive first novel, Rum tackles domestic violence and the strict mores of traditional Arab culture, showing how they affect three generations of Palestinian women. The Brooklyn-set story focuses on Isra, a young Palestinian whose family has married her off to Adam and sent her to America to live with his family. His overbearing mother, Fareeda, reinforces the gender restrictions and stereotypes that have led to her own oppression. Rum adeptly knits together the narratives of these two women with that of Isra's daughter Deya to reveal Isra's story. Deya, who lives with her grandparents and Isra's other three daughters, resists an arranged marriage, and Rum injects suspense as Deya gradually discovers the truth about her mother and father's relationship. Thus she gains the strength and insight needed to face her future, perhaps the same strength and insight required of Rum to write this book. VERDICT Rum admits in the introduction that "to tell this story would be the ultimate shame to my community." Through well-developed characters and a wonderfully paced narrative, she exposes the impact that the embedded patriarchy of some cultures can have on women while showing more broadly how years of shame, secrets, and betrayal can burden families across generations no matter what the cultural or religious affiliation. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 9/24/18.]-Faye Chadwell, Oregon State Univ., Corvallis © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
In his last sermon, the Prophet Muhammad said, "Observe your duty to Allah in respect to the women, and treat them well," but in many Muslim countries, tradition relegates women to subservient roles. Isra Hadid, the heroine of Rum's debut novel, has been reminded of this every day of her life.Unable to complete school in Palestine, where she grew up, Isra was married off by her parents to American deli owner Adam Ra'ad and sent to Brooklyn, New York, where she was forced to live in the crowded Bay Ridge home of her in-laws, Fareeda and Khaled, and their three other children. Almost immediately tensions erupted, and the newly arrived immigrant found herself on the receiving end of near-daily beatings and verbal abuse. Conditions further worsened after Isra gave birth to four daughters in little more than five yearsher lack of sons being evidence, Fareeda claims, of Isra's deficiency. The situation shifts dramatically, however, after Isra and Adam are killed in an accident, leaving their children to be raised by the Ra'ads. Now, a decade after Isra's and Adam's deaths, their oldest child, Deya, age 18, receives a mysterious message from an unidentified source, asking her to travel to a Manhattan bookshop. When she does, an estranged family member reveals some jarring truths about the family's history. More importantly, the disclosure gives Deya the tools she needs to take charge of her life rather than allowing Fareeda and Khaled to marry her off. In a note accompanying an advance copy of her book, Rum acknowledges that writing her intergenerational saga meant "violating [the] code of silence" and might even bring "shame to [her] community." Nonetheless, in telling this compelling tale, Rumwho was born in Brooklyn to Palestinian immigrants herselfwrites that she hopes readers will be moved "by the strength and power of our women."A richly detailed and emotionally charged debut. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
